Discussion of the approaches and dimensions of human transformity through an educational case

摘要

Human transformities are important for emergy accounting of human labor contributions in ecological, economic, and social systems. Lupinacci and Bonilla (2018) explored two different approaches to calculating teacher transformities in an English Language school in Minas Gerais, Brazil. This letter is not to criticize their approach and result, but instead to suggest one minor but potentially valuable amendment to their method. The innovation is to treat the transformity of the teacher as a variable on the input side of the equation. The new computed transformity of 1.21 E9 sej/J was 3.5 times larger than the transformity calculated by Lupinacci and Bonilla (2018). This E9 result is in line with other research that applied a multi-year cyclic calculation. The algebraic solution is one that could be applied more generally to other similar transformity equations.