Ampliamento del metodo di analisi exergia estesa a includere una valutazione dinamica del grado di Sostenibilità di un Paese.

Abstract: The XXI century is the cornerstone of change of the natural capital usage for the economic development of countries: from the first industrial revolution to the last decades of the past century, the natural resources were considered finiteness; nowadays it is clear that such an approach was incorrect and there cannot be a productive activity neglecting either the scarcity of resources and their impact on the environment. For decades, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been used to assess the health of Society, but this is a controversial issue in the scientific community: the most critical aspect is that the GDP was meant to evaluate the marketable part of a society, disregarding the potential harmful effect of productive activities. As a consequence, several indicators have been developed with the ambition of replace or supplement the GDP with minor results. The main aim of the research project was therefore to find an indicator that could be alternative -or complementary- to the GDP in the assessment of the sustainability of a human settlement/society. Based on previous documented and well-published research, the Extended Exergy, a thermodynamic-based indicator, was selected as the numeraire. The initial phase of this project consisted in the construction of a series of EXCEL sheets for the computation of the Extended Exergy Analysis of Italy, with a novel approach based on a very disaggregated database extracted and adapted from national and European statistical institutions, utilities, national banks etc. After calculating an exergy budget of the System Italy, all material and immaterial commodities have been converted to their primary equivalent exergy values so that it was possible to derive the trend of EEA over a 22 years timeframe. The measure taken to represent the state of the Society is its Extended Exergy consumption rate (“EE”), which measures the cumulative consumption of primary resources necessary for the System’s survival and growth. A comparison with the GDP and other currently popular indicators revealed a different trend of the EE with respect to that of the GDP and provided a deeper insight with respect to all of the other indicators