(5cq) Sustainable Energy and Environmental Resource Management: a Systems Theory Approach

The intensity and scale of human activities on planet Earth has led to severe depletion and deterioration of natural resources. Since this has strong implications on the continued existence of the human race, understanding and maintaining the ecosystem services is of paramount importance. Sustainability has emerged as a new paradigm of analysis and management. Two aspects that are critical for human and ecosystem sustenance are energy and environment. While energy is the most important driver behind our economic development of the past century, environment plays a critical role in ensuring the well being of various species, including humans. The research presented in this poster focuses on developing sustainable management policies for these two important resources. A systems theory approach based on information theory, efficient modeling and problem solution techniques (such as optimization and control) forms the basis of the work.

In the area of energy management, the work focuses on developing engineering solutions of biomass feedstock production system since biomass feedstock production (BFP) is a critical subsystem within the overall bio-based energy production and utilization system. It is an important precursor for the success of bioenergy initiative and includes the operations of agronomic production of energy crops and physical handling/delivery of biomass, as well as other enabling logistics. The research work will focus on the engineering solutions for its subsystem of biomass feed stock production while keeping in mind its “external” interactions and influencing factors, such as social/economic considerations, environmental impact, and policy/regulatory issues.

In the area of environmental resource management, this work analyzes an integrated ecological-economic-social model. The model is an integration of a food web model and a macro-economic model and is an abstract representation of the world (a ‘mini world'). The work conducts scenario studies on the model, where scenarios are possible future developments, to identify potential catastrophic events and the ensuing system-wide consequences. The manifestation of inter-compartmental dependencies is a valuable asset of this analysis. The work then uses Fisher information based objective functions (based in information theory) to derive time dependent management strategies to ensure system stability. The results from the dynamic optimization problem give qualitative guidelines for policy making.

The overall theme of the research work thus is to implement systems theory based approaches to develop sustainable ecosystem.