485 41 Is Emergy Best Suited for Ecological Economics, Environmental Economics, or with an Economic Context of Its Own? Erik Grönlund, Daniel Hedin and Per-Olof Eriksson ABSTRACT Emergy accounting is sometimes referred to as ecological economics, and H.T. Odum one of the founders of the field. The definition of ecological economics is very wide, and emergy accounting can fit in readily with the definition given. However, the emergy concept is rarely recognized in the bulk of ecological economics text, and ecological economics students have often never heard of the concept. Emergy can not fit into the theoretical neoclassical context of environmental economics, which views environmental questions as a subfield of economy. As an estimator for externalities where markets are nonpresent it can, however, be used by not so “hard core” environmental economists. On the other hand economic flows produced in a neoclassical context are often used by emergy accountants. In this paper emergy is also discussed as a third category of economics and from that position compared to neoclassical environmental economics and ecological economics. Similarities and differences are expressed, and some economic subfield etiquettes other than ecological economics are suggested for emergy accounting. INTRODUCTION Emergy accounting is sometimes referred to as ecological economics, and H.T. Odum as one of the founders of the field (Hall 1996, Brown and Hall 2004, Wikipedia, 2007). However, the emergy concept is rarely recognized in the bulk of ecological economics texts, and often the ecological economics students have never heard of the concept. The objective of this paper is to discuss if emergy accounting should be viewed as ecological economics or environmental economics, or if it is another type of economic branch. The structure of the paper is: environmental economics is briefly presented with special focus on its relation to natural science. Then, ecological economics is introduced, and next is described how economic flows are used in emergy accounting. Then we discuss how emergy calculations fits into the frames of environmental economics and ecological economics, and further, emergy is discussed as a possible economic subfield of its own rather than part of the fields of environmental and ecological economics. ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS The theoretical foundation of environmental economics is neoclassical economy and the so called Wealth theory (see e.g. Söderqvist and Soutukorva, 2006). The core of the theory is market choices made by individuals. Where real markets do not exist, which is often the case in environmental economics, methodological options still based on choices by individuals has been developed. Since many environmental issues are described mainly in natural science based terms, it is a problem that the