Scholars in environmental accounting have developed many methods, capable to transform raw environmental and socio-economic data into useful information, both to protect natural ecosystems and to define the most appropriate policy and planning options to meet the existing sustainable development goals. Due to the high number of existing research challenges and needs, Beijing Normal University organized a World Summit on Environmental Accounting and Management on “Designing A Prosperous and Sustainable Future”, which was held in Beijing on July 4-6, 2016. The main topic of the conference was the inclusion of system-wide effects into on-site environmental impacts, considering an integrated environmental accounting and management framework. The outcomes of this international summit, partially represented by the papers published in this Special Volume, provide an opportunity to assess the most recent progresses in biophysical and socioeconomic accounting, as well as in modeling the impacts of anthropogenic activities on environmental and socioeconomic systems. This SV includes cutting-edge papers, that focused on promoting the theories, ideas and practices involved in ecological accounting and management. All the works are aimed to develop broader perspectives, which can be applied to ecosystem protection, as well as on planning and policy-making in view of a transition toward more sustainable and equitable societies, as indicated through the Sustainable Development Goals.

Introduction

At the end of 19th Century, the development of several new branches of sciences supported the birth of a new vision of the world. Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, chemistry (with the year 1860 conference in Karlsruhe) and ecology were among the key emerging disciplines, which enabled the disclosure of new narratives about our planet and the biosphere. Close to the Second World War, interdisciplinary enquiries tried, for the first time, to find deeper connections among chemistry, physics and biology. This is the case of the book “What is life?” by E. Schrödinger (1944). The same attention was given to the intersections between physics and social sciences, as suggested in the posthumous paper, published in year 1942, by the Italian physicist Ettore Majorana (Majorana and Mantegna, 2006). The focus on resources limitation, pollution and the environment developed a few decades later. The publication of “Silent Spring” (Carson, 1962), “Patient Earth” (Harte and Socolow, 1971) and “The limits to Growth” (Meadows et al., 1972) were among the signs of such a shift of attention. Systems ecology views, with the outstanding works by H. T. Odum (1924-2002), created a fertile background for further research, trying to develop a holistic view, in order to integrate the biophysical and socio-economic dimensions of human society. New interdisciplinary integration attempts, which are of interest for environmental accounting, were represented by ecophysics and evolutionary physics. In particular, starting from the 1970s, the study of physical conditions for life stability on planets were studied. In particular, they were developed on the basis of non-equilibrium thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, considering planet-star relations (e.g.: Sertorio, 1991; Sertorio and Renda, 2009). Then, allometric scaling laws for different living species were connected to the stability of different living species, also considering the differences among them, with a specific focus on humans (e.g.: Gorshkov, 1995). The interactions among humans, technologies and the environment, as well as economy, was discussed from a physical perspective (e.g.: Casazza, 2012; Sertorio and Renda, 2018), as well as from a socio-ecological perspective (e.g.: Odum, 2007; Singh et al., 2012; Lockie et al., 2013; Park and Guille-Escuret, 2017). Finally, the ecosystem dynamics was re-discussed, introducing the use of goal functions (also called orientors) instead of state functions (Tiezzi, 2006).