Revisiting the Operational Principle of Sustainability: Physical and Economic Aspects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper reviews the ideas of measuring physical and economic sustainability of human civilisation proposed by different schools of thought, namely earth sciences, ecological economics, neoclassical economics and engineering, in order to fill the cognitive gaps between the different disciplines. The paper focuses on physical material and energy flows that enable human economic activities and introduces the distinction between flow and stock, as well as that between material and energy.It proposes a revised operational principle of sustainability, or transition towards new state of civilisation: The overall vision of a civilisation based on natural flow and man-made stock, using natural energy stock during the transition phase, supplemented by the following amended operational principle: (a) Ecological services that are needed to maintain life shall be conserved, and waste and pollution levels shall be within the natural assimilative capacity; (b) consumption shall be within the capacity of renewable resources; and (c) consumption of non-renewable resources shall be associated with investment in renewable substitutes.The paper also provides selected indicators, following the revised operational principle: (a) Degree of dependence on natural hydrocarbon stock regarding fuel consumption for heating, transportation and other motive power as well as electricity generation; (b) Energy profit ratio (EPR) for natural hydrocarbon stock relative to natural energy stock; (c) non-energy ecological footprint for biocapacity; and (d) water stress. These could usefully indicate the past and present state and trend of sustainability, thereby suggesting future limits to human activities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".