ABSTRACT
Energy and environmental issues seem to follow the life cycle path of a normal commodity in a mature economy, characterized by phases of upswing and downswing. This also holds for scientific research in this field. Resource and energy analysis has become a rapidly growing research field at the crossroads of technical and social sciences. The fourfold increase in oil prices in late 1973 and the subsequent economic crisis which has affected the industrialized world since then have stressed the relevance of designing a coherent methodology for energy and resource analysis. There is a wide variety of methods and models that are used for regional or urban energy–environmental analysis. They can be classified according to their purpose degree of complexity, the degree of multidisciplinarity the time frame covered and so on. An unambiguous classification is difficult to achieve. Simple input–output methods include amongst others, the well-known energy-Gross Domestic Product (E-GDP) ratio studies.
