Emergy Evaluation of Agriculture System in Oasis-Desert Region: Tarim River Basin Case Study

In this paper, emergy analysis method is used to evaluate the performance and development of agriculture in Tarim River Basin for the period from 1988 to 2008. The results showed that the total and purchased emergy inputs were increasing steadily, and agriculture system depended on non-renewable heavily played a good eco-economic performance. However, the load on the environment becomes heavier than before, and durative of agriculture system has a gradual decline which the ELR and ESI indices indicate. So it is time to transfer the traditional agriculture to the organic one. Of the agriculture and its four subsystems, crop and stockbreeding play more important roles in Tarim River Basin.