干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

This paper presents an ecological analysis of the performance and development of agriculture in Tarim river basin for the period from 1988 to 2008. Emergy analysis method is used to diagram the agriculture system, to evaluate environmental and economic inputs and harvested yield, and to assess the sustainability of agriculture in Tarim river basin as a whole, which was appropriate for this task because of its ability to transform different types of inputs to a common form (solar energy equivalents). 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 duration 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. In response to regional economic development, both emergy intensity and emergy/money ratio confirm that resource use efficiency is improving during the process of agricultural development.