MWTools

Statement of need

In societal energy analysis and societal exergy analysis (SEA), animals and humans provide energy to society by performing muscle work. A previous study by Steenwyk et al. (2022) developed and standardized ways to estimate muscle work contributed to society by animals and humans. And data exist from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Labor Organization (ILO) that could be used for such purposes. However, none of the data are in the PSUT format proposed by Heun, Owen, and Brockway (2018). Computational tools are needed to gather and shape relevant data.

This package provides functions for the estimation of animal and human muscle work for use in SEA with the Physical Supply Use Table (PSUT) framework.

Installation

You can install this package from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("EnergyEconomyDecoupling/MWTools")

More Information

Find more information, including vignettes and function documentation, at https://energyeconomydecoupling.github.io/MWTools/.

References

Heun, Matthew Kuperus, Anne Owen, and Paul E. Brockway. 2018. “A Physical Supply-Use Table Framework for Energy Analysis on the Energy Conversion Chain.” Applied Energy 226 (September): 1134–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2018.05.109.

Steenwyk, Paul, Matthew Kuperus Heun, Paul Brockway, Tânia Sousa, and Sofia Henriques. 2022. “The Contributions of Muscle and Machine Work to Land and Labor Productivity in World Agriculture Since 1800.” Biophysical Economics and Sustainability 7 (2): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41247-022-00096-z.