ABSTRACT
This chapter presents Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM) as a tool to analyse the nexus between energy, food, water, land use, and socio-economic characteristics. MuSIASEM can be used for diagnostic and simulation purposes by checking the viability, desirability and feasibility of current and proposed metabolic patterns of society. Its application involves several steps: definition of what the system is in terms of fund elements such as human activity, managed land, power capacity, and what it does in terms of flow elements such as energy, food, water, monetary flows; construction of a multi-scale, multi-dimensional representation of the metabolic pattern; and checking viability and desirability in relation to internal constraints, and feasibility in relation to external constraints. The chapter also presents some examples of dendrograms of fund and flow elements and the corresponding relative sizes of functional compartments of society.
