Progress and its enlightenments in application research on emergy theory

Emergy, a new approach for measuring the product and process of natural support system and economic system, provides a new scale for analyzing and evaluating environment, resource, human labor, information and development decision. Through literature review, this paper comprehensively analyzed the merits and demerits of emergy theory, as well as the content, methods and areas of current application research on emergy theory from three aspects: emergy theory, research progress of emergy theory, and prospects of application research on emergy theory. Finally, future directions were proposed for deepening the application research on emergy theory.