Entropy debt: A link to sustainability?

Despite popular awareness of our human impact on the natural environment, anthropogenic environmental degradation continues today. Yet, a science of sustainability is emerging that seeks to better understand the relationships between humans and the natural environment. Some of this research views municipalities, cities, and nations through the conceptual lens of open systems thermodynamics, and specifically, the theory of dissipative structures. The theory of dissipative structures holds that the 'structure' of open systems, i.e. complexity, requires a constant throughput of energy, which 'dissipates' energy gradients in the environment external to the system. This is the 'entropy debt' of system complexity, which is necessitated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The theory of dissipative structures provided this research with a conceptual opportunity to highlight and, using surrogate measure, analyse the relationship between municipal 'structure', the energy drawn from the natural environment required to maintain the structure, and the resulting cost to the natural environment of doing so. Examples of surrogate measures included, population characteristics (i.e. structure), fossil fuel consumption (i.e. energy throughput), and air contaminants (i.e. entropy debt). Five similarly constrained British Columbia municipalities with similar population sizes were investigated to determine a) how the theory of dissipative structures could effectively be operationalized, and b) if doing so could elucidate systemic drivers of anthropogenic environmental degradation. An analysis of the surrogate data revealed that some structural characteristics, such as population density and infrastructure type, appeared to correspond with higher or lower surrogate measure of entropy debt. The findings encourage researchers to further develop the analogical model of this research into an applied model capable of measuring progress toward or away from sustainability.