In this Commentary, we advocate the use of emergy (spelled with “m”) analysis to address and quantify – alongside with the scientific ones – the legal and social aspects that take part in the planning of climate policies and actions. Emergy analysis is suitable to approach the complexity of both local and global climate-related issues, offering a peculiar epistemology that overcomes the anthropocentric nature of current measures. At the same time, it allows the assessment of both nature and human-based flows of resources within a thermodynamic quantitative framework.

Like many Mediterranean areas, the Italian island of Sicily faces multiple environmental pressures such as soil loss, fire hazards, and extreme meteorological events, all of which negatively impact local food systems. In response to these threats, a re-thinking of local agriculture and natural resource management is increasingly needed. Agroecology is recognized as a robust proposal for building more resilient food systems grounded in farmers’ knowledge and practices. However, agroecological farming experiences struggle to operate and survive in Sicily due to unfavorable political-cultural, environmental, and socio-economic conditions. Learning from small-scale farmers about the ways they perceive, understand, and overcome structural limits and environmental constraints is key for a transition to agroecology in the study area. Understanding its potentials and limits is essential for planning and identifying transformative actions. We approached the problem by adopting a participatory action research methodology involving selected groups of farmers in Western Sicily. We applied a co-creative approach and developed a systemic analysis of the socio-ecological narratives to identify possible leverage points for a transition to agroecology in the study area. We identified a local potential for shifting the current system of water and fire hazards management to new systems of participatory land stewardship. To be effective, these systems should support agroecological farmers’ income by altering social practices related to food and reducing the influence of dominant agribusiness actors. Our findings indicate that implementing solutions based on the circulation of local ecological knowledge within systems of participatory guarantees can favor the development of solidarity economies and mutualistic relations between farmers, scientists, and communities. Our work suggests that scientists’ facilitation and knowledge co-creation might be of key importance in structuring local, more sustainable food systems.

Two of the most critical issues of sustainability are how future ecosystem services (ES) will change under natural and artificial stressors. To answer the above problems accurately with a quantitative manner and develop an intelligent and sustainable management of ecosystems, the projections of ES considering climate change under different Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) are needed. However, current ES projection studies often lack quantitative methods to simulate ES dynamics, especially incapability to integrate the interactions between climate and land use changes on ES dynamics. To overcome these challenges, this study proposes a framework for ES simulation under climate and land use change stressors. The framework developed includes four modules: climatic attributes simulation, land use change simulation, scenario design, and ecosystem services simulation modules. Taking China as a case study, this study simulated the evolution of China's ES under the interactions between climate and land use change during the period of 2020-2100. The simulation results show that China's ES increases by 33%, 34%, 9%, and 60% under scenarios SSP1, SSP2, SSP3, and SSP5, respectively. Additionally, the overall growth rate of ES decreases by a gradually slowing rate from the mean at 1% during 2000-2020 to 0.5% during 2020-2100, respectively. Meanwhile, the ES in China shows significantly spatial variability based on simulation results. Shandong province yields the largest potential to be the key area with ES declining in the future. At ecosystem scale, increases in woodland ES are expected to dominate China's ES growth continuously. In the first four decades (2020-2060), development ways under SSP1 scenario are more helpful to promote increase in subtypes of ES, while in the last four decades (2060-2100), ES are expected to increase under SSP5 scenario. The key contributions of this study include tracking the causation and revealing the influencing mechanism of interactions of climate and land use change (rather than regional overlapping or single factor) on ES dynamics, and quantitatively simulating ES dynamics under the two integrated drivers. This study can be further extended to other cases and various scales to provide risk assessment for ecosystem services loss and detailed guidance for ecosystem conservation and management methodology with robustness and reliability in rapidly changeable environments, and critical analysis on the tradeoffs between social environmental investments and ecological welfare.

Nature-based solutions to ecological challenges have continued to draw significant attention, and are connected to the increased establishment of protected areas as a means for climate and ecological crisis mitigation. This study presents an innovative approach that combines spatial and statistical analysis of land cover change and drivers to evaluate land use management and effectiveness of 22 designated protected areas (PAs) across the tropical coastal regions of sub-Saharan Africa. While the results provided insight into land use management and conservation priorities, it highlighted (1) the use of these protected areas for food production is prevalent, irrespective of its designation. Nevertheless, there is evidence of a decline in cropland in some of the protected areas, suggesting a shift in policy towards conservation land use. (2) The occurrence of forest loss suggests that conservation is weak in most of the protected areas, while wetland conservation efforts are stronger due to their land cover expansion. (3) Population density (human factor) is the most significant driver of land cover change in these protected areas, followed by elevation (natural environment), precipitation (climate), nighttime light (socio-economic), and slope (natural environment). (4) In terms of Ecosystem value, only 15 of the 22 protected areas exhibited an increase in their total ecosystem service value according to land cover change, indicating sustainable land use and measures effectiveness in these protected areas. However, based on an individual land cover assessment, most protected areas showed signs of loss, especially in forests. Given the projected population growth in Africa, a regular assessment of protected areas should be initiated to enable effective and timely management decisions. Additionally, policies to improve the management effectiveness of African protected areas through funding should be a top priority, while taking into consideration the livelihoods of the indigenous people in the area in order to find a sustainable balance.

Ecological interactions are fundamental at the cellular scale, addressing the possibility of a description of cellular systems that uses language and principles of ecology. In this work, we use a minimal ecological approach that encompasses growth, adaptation and survival of cell populations to model cell metabolisms and competition under energetic constraints. As a proof-of-concept, we apply this general formulation to study the dynamics of the onset of a specific blood cancer-called Multiple Myeloma. We show that a minimal model describing antagonist cell populations competing for limited resources, as regulated by microenvironmental factors and internal cellular structures, reproduces patterns of Multiple Myeloma evolution, due to the uncontrolled proliferation of cancerous plasma cells within the bone marrow. The model is characterized by a class of regime shifts to more dissipative states for selectively advantaged malignant plasma cells, reflecting a breakdown of self-regulation in the bone marrow. The transition times obtained from the simulations range from years to decades consistently with clinical observations of survival times of patients. This irreversible dynamical behavior represents a possible description of the incurable nature of myelomas based on the ecological interactions between plasma cells and the microenvironment, embedded in a larger complex system. The use of ATP equivalent energy units in defining stocks and flows is a key to constructing an ecological model which reproduces the onset of myelomas as transitions between states of a system which reflects the energetics of plasma cells. This work provides a basis to construct more complex models representing myelomas, which can be compared with model ecosystems.

So far, urban scaling theory has proven that urban area, infrastructure, and economic output have a scaling relation with population. But if we consider ecological space as a part of urban infrastructure, would the same scaling characteristics exist? What is the scaling relationship between ecological spaces and economic social development in different stages of urbanization? This paper is based on this question and explores the trade-off between social economic system and ecosystem in 370 cities of China. The results show that the relationship between population and urban ecological space generally follows the scaling theory in terms of different types of ecological spaces and ecosystem services. For every 10-fold increase in population size, the total area of ecological space and ecosystem services increase by approximately 4 times. The manifestation of ecological space following the scaling laws is the aggregation behavior of better network connectivity. There is a trade-off between urban ecological space and socioeconomic development, with flow equilibrium reached at a population of 2 million and efficiency equilibrium reached at a population of 1 million. Starting from type I and type II megapolis, urban development gradually tends to stabilize, and there may even be a trend of slow decline in urban development potential. In the absence of ecological space, virtual network space can serve as a substitute for ecological space. The driving factors affect scaling behavior of ecological space, including connectivity of ecological space, spatial heterogeneity of natural conditions, and disturbance of economic and social activities. This research can help city to expand ecological space, promoting the added value of urban ecological assets and keeping the urban development potential within the optimal threshold range continuously.

Air pollution is impacting ecosystem services (ES). This paper proposes an emergy-based method framework to assess the dynamic impacts of near-real-time air pollution on ES at different temporal-spatial scales. The paper presents the cases of Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing and Baoding, China, investigates the impacts of air pollution on the ES in 2020. In particular, we compared the reduction in ES evaluated using either average (R1) or near-real-time (R2) air pollution data. The results indicate that the differences between R1 and R2 range from about 9% (for Baoding) to almost 45% (for Shenzhen), thus implying the underestimation of the impacts of air pollution on ES based on average data. The ratios of the reduction in ES to the average ES per hour are near-real-time dynamic, with the values of 0–231.62%, 0–59.42%, 0–50.51%, and 0–35.26% in Shanghai, Baoding, Beijing and Shenzhen respectively. Although the air quality in Shanghai is aggregately better than that in Baoding in 2020, the reduction in ES caused by air pollution in Shanghai is more than twice as that of in Baoding, emphasizing the necessity of investigating the impacts of near-real-time air pollution to properly reveal and assess the potential ecological risks. The ratio of the annual total reduction in ES to the annual total ES, near-real-time reduction in ES to the average ES per hour, and near-real-time reduction in ES to the near-real-time ES in Beijing are 7.22%, 0–50.51% and 0–219.27% respectively, highlighting the significance of near-real-time monitoring of air pollution and ES to reveal the potential or hidden impacts of air pollution on ES, and further to facilitate more high time-efficient and fine ecosystem management and conservation.

Urbanization plays a key role in the human activities causing and feeding climate change. At present, climate change and other environmental issues are directly or indirectly related to the metabolism of cities. However, cities may also play a central role in the fight against climate change. This is the reason why Urban Metabolism (UM) has become a powerful concept to account for and understand the way in which complex systems such as cities use and dispose of material resources, also suggesting measures to change their operational regimes. The rightsizing and optimization of UM is basically a matter of social innovation. It implies changes in the way a city collectively produces and reproduces its physical stocks and provides services to its inhabitants. This article aims at identifying strategies, scenarios, and pathways to slow down urban metabolic processes while improving their efficiency, thus managing a successful transition to an urban (more) circular economy, as well as decreasing the material intensity of the urban economy. The main objectives of the article are the following:1. The development of a renewed approach for studying Urban Metabolism based on transdisciplinary approaches and methods aimed to model metabolic agents' patterns of practices.2. The definition of urban patterns of resource use of different agents shaping urban metabolism (households, corporate agents, communities, and public authorities).3. The exploration of the main policies and administrative tools that cities use to manage environmental problems leading to different urban regulation regimes.4. A tool for generating future scenarios and roadmaps to reach a low-carbon future. This tool is crucial for engaging experts, stakeholders and the public looking for new solutions.

Collaborative governance is increasingly advocated to address the ecological risk management issues that occur during urban agglomeration developing. However, how to form strong and effective collaboration is still a great challenge among multiple cities in urban agglomeration. By analysing the multiple ecological risk transmission pathways of the case of Pearl River Delta Urban Agglomeration (PRD) in China, this paper aims at deconstructing the complex structure and connection types in urban agglomeration, as well as exploring the inherent mechanism of ecological risk governance to achieve collaboration. Thus, a new Bayesian network model of ecological risk transmission is developed to visualize the key connection notes of risk transmission process. Testing the impacts of (1) number of collaborative cities, (2) spatial distance factor and (3) risk transmission links, we can find the optimal cooperative risk management strategy by reducing the probability of occurrence of key nodes and intervening on the critical path of the risk transmission process. The results show that (1) The current collaborative governance plan in the PRD is mainly formulated by large cities driving small surrounding cities, which is not an optimal strategy. (2) The management effect of ecological risks in urban agglomerations is not necessarily positively correlated with the number of collaborative cities. There are multiple combinations methods under a certain number of collaborative cities and the effects of ecological risk collaborative governance are different. (3) Collaboration governance of urban agglomeration should be based on the overall planning of urban development, and comprehensively consider collaboration number, spatial distance and association between cities.

Positive single-strand ribonucleic acid [(+)ssRNA] viruses can cause multiple outbreaks, for which comprehensive tailored therapeutic strategies are still missing. Virus and host cell dynamics are tightly connected, generating a complex dynamics that conveys in virion assembly to ensure virus spread in the body. Starting from the knowledge of relevant processes in (+ss)RNA virus replication, transcription, translation, virions budding and shedding, and their respective energy costs, we built up a systems thinking (ST)–based diagram of the virus–host interaction, comprehensive of stocks, flows, and processes as well-described in literature. In ST approach, stocks and flows are expressed by a proxy of the energy embedded and transmitted, respectively, whereas processes are referred to the energy required for the system functioning. In this perspective, healthiness is just a particular configuration, in which stocks relevant for the system (equivalent but not limited to proteins, RNA, DNA, and all metabolites required for the survival) are constant, and the system behavior is stationary. At time of infection, the presence of additional stocks (e.g., viral protein and RNA and all metabolites required for virion assembly and spread) confers a complex network of feedbacks leading to new configurations, which can evolve to maximize the virions stock, thus changing the system structure, output, and purpose. The dynamic trajectories will evolve to achieve a new stationary status, a phenomenon described in microbiology as integration and symbiosis when the system is resilient enough to the changes, or the system may stop functioning and die. Application of external driving forces, acting on processes, can affect the dynamic trajectories adding a further degree of complexity, which can be captured by ST approach, used to address these new configurations. Investigation of system configurations in response to external driving forces acting is developed by computational analysis based on ST diagrams, with the aim at designing novel therapeutic approaches.

Personalized nanomedicine has rapidly evolved over the past decade to tailor the diagnosis and treatment of several diseases to the individual characteristics of each patient. In oncology, iron oxide nano-biomaterials (NBMs) have become a promising biomedical product in targeted drug delivery as well as in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as a contrast agent and magnetic hyperthermia. The combination of diagnosis and therapy in a single nano-enabled product (so-called theranostic agent) in the personalized nanomedicine has been investigated so far mostly in terms of local events, causes-effects, and mutual relationships. However, this approach could fail in capturing the overall complexity of a system, whereas systemic approaches can be used to study the organization of phenomena in terms of dynamic configurations, independent of the nature, type, or spatial and temporal scale of the elements of the system. In medicine, complex descriptions of diseases and their evolution are daily assessed in clinical settings, which can be thus considered as complex systems exhibiting self-organizing and non-linear features, to be investigated through the identification of dynamic feedback-driven behaviors. In this study, a Systems Thinking (ST) approach is proposed to represent the complexity of the theranostic modalities in the context of the personalized nanomedicine through the setting up of a stock-flow diagram. Specifically, the interconnections between the administration of magnetite NBMs for diagnosis and therapy of tumors are fully identified, emphasizing the role of the feedback loops. The presented approach has revealed its suitability for further application in the medical field. In particular, the obtained stock-flow diagram can be adapted for improving the future knowledge of complex systems in personalized nanomedicine as well as in other nanosafety areas.

Although the knowledge and understanding of biodiversity is rapidly increasing, very little of the total biodiversity is currently considered in applied conservation actions. In this sense, it is crucial to integrate independent fields of biodiversity models and perspectives with conservation issues, in particular, the views that address the links between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being, species interaction, and focal charismatic species. This study overcomes the lack of framework necessary for this integration, and proposes three perspectives and approaches to assess biodiversity. The first perspective is biodiversity potential. It considers the correlation between renewable resources in local ecosystems and biodiversity potential, in terms of the possibility of maintaining a high degree of biodiversity. The energy cost is evaluated using both static and dynamic methods, based on the measure of the emergy of local renewable resources and of the total emergy throughput needed by components in ecosystem food webs, respectively, also highlighting the link between biodiversity and ecosystem services, species interactions via energy transfer respectively. The second perspective considers the contribution of biodiversity to human well-being, such as domestication. In this approach, we assess the contribution of biodiversity to humans by calculating the emergy of non-renewable resources required to domesticate animals or plants into agricultural products. The third perspective highlights the significance of local focal charismatic species to global biodiversity conservation. Taking rare species as an example, the emergy required to maintain rare species per unit area is used as a quantitative indicator of the role of local rare species in maintaining global biodiversity. By measuring biodiversity from these three perspectives (potential, contribution and significance) simultaneously, biodiversity conservation strategies are addressed for different regions. Taking China as a case study, it shows that the provinces featuring high potential, low contribution and low significance can moderately increase biodiversity development. The provinces with high significance to global biodiversity should strengthen conservation to halt biodiversity loss. The areas exhibiting overexploitation of biodiversity should in turn restrict biodiversity exploitation. The general approaches proposed in this study could be applied to different cases, situations and species, promoting the integration to biodiversity conservation actions at different scales.

Pakistan is a resource-constrained country, poor in municipal and healthcare facilities. Existing healthcare structures in the country are often overcrowded, and an effective monitoring and assessment of their sustainability is therefore crucial. In this study, a systemic approach is outlined to evaluate the environmental sustainability of the largest and sole public hospital in the major city of Gujranwala, in the Punjab region of Pakistan. The Emergy (spelled with "m") Accounting (EMA) method is applied. Its operationalization allows to keep track of the amount of energy that was consumed in direct and indirect transformations to make a product or service. Relevant data include the hospital requirements in terms of energy, water, products, labor, and services. The EMA results offer a supply-side geobiosphere-oriented perspective. Emergy indicators show that the hospital is indirectly responsible for a significant stress on the environment, that might be decreased by an increased efficiency in the resource use. On the other hand, a hospital is a complex system, depending on skilled laborforce as well as on several fine imported medical products and related services, making it dependent on external socio-economic systems. The presented results address the geography dependent characteristics of the hospital, and can be used for benchmarking and future evaluation of similar hospitals within and across the region. (C) 2021 L&H Scientific Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved.

Fishmeal is the optimal source of protein for fed fish and crustacean species, but the increase in market demand and prices is pushing the aquaculture industry to test alternative protein sources. This paper provides the results of an emergy assessment performed on four partial substitutes for fishmeal – dried microalgae biomass from Tetraselmis suecica and Tisochrysis lutea, insect meal from Hermetia illucens larvae, and poultry by-product meal – and then compares them with the findings of a previously published Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) on the same topic. By quantifying their degree of dependence on natural resources, the research offers a complementary perspective to that of LCA, thus allowing to obtain a complete picture on the sustainability of the four production systems. Firstly, the results reveal that insect meal has the highest environmental efficiency in terms of total emergy per unit of product, followed by poultry by-product meal. The two closed microalgae cultivation systems are penalized by a low productivity, combined with a high quantity of seawater imported. Secondly, several critical aspects are highlighted by the five emergy-based indicators: in brief, all systems appear to be based on intensive industrial processes, with the imported inputs from the economy representing 99% of total emergy flow (high level of ecosystem stress). Since local renewable inputs are not significantly exploited, higher levels of production amplify the ratio between these resources and the inputs imported from the outer economies (no economies of scale are observed). Finally, the comparison with LCA results confirms a critical point already detected by the emergy assessment (i.e. the crucial contribution of the feed provided to insect and poultry) but also reveals new ones: (i) in the two microalgae systems, the high emergy contribution from seawater versus the high impacts of carbon dioxide and energy needs; (ii) in the insect meal system, the high emergy share represented by human labour and energy needs. In light of the numerous problems found, possible approaches are proposed to increase the environmental performance through changes to each production system and the processes that support it upstream.

Health services represent a cornerstone to ensure well-being and human rights, particularly in deprived areas. The resource cost and appropriate use for the implementation of a top-quality hospital in Sudan are here investigated. An emerging approach such as systems-based Emergy Accounting is applied to assess its sustain ability and resilience, also relying on Life-Cycle Assessment data to calculate some new unit emergy values. Very few similar studies have addressed civil works so far, even less bioclimatic buildings, while the focus on health systems is an absolute novelty. Particular attention is paid to design in adverse climate and economic conditions, to the humanitarian nongovernmental organisation running the hospital, and to the cutting-edge medical staff and technologies imported from abroad, also letting local practitioners train in excellence medicine. The system?s direct and indirect socio-ecological requirements are expressed as emergy (resource investment) per patient-day, per cardiac surgical operation, per outpatient visit, and per year. From a quantitative viewpoint, these indicators represent a benchmark for improvement scenarios, comparison with new studies in a deserving field, and future investments, driven by effective healthcare policies. They also provide an overview of the efforts required by nature and society to ensure a human right in conditions of scarcity. Besides the possibility to lower a hospital?s environmental impact (sustainability-oriented) and to keep it functioning over time in changing climate, resource, societal, economic, and geo-political scenarios (resilience-oriented), this study leads to original remarks upon societal priorities and upon the challenges of guaranteeing high-quality health systems in an uncertain century.

Controlled precipitation of metal nanostructures into glassy matrices have demonstrated to be a valid way to synthesize materials suitable for photonics, optoelectronics and telecom purposes. However, the development of strategies for driving nanostructure formation, and then for tailoring the optical response of the metal doped systems, is still a challenge. Aiming at this, the present study focuses on silver state modification including nucleation/growth of Ag nanoparticles (NPs), manipulation of Ag NPs size and size-distribution in Ag+-Na+ ion exchanged silicate glasses undergone post-exchange treatments, such as thermal annealing and laser irradiation with different irradiation parameters. Raman and optical absorption spectroscopy analyses allow to follow the evolution of the Ag NPs precipitation process starting from the early stages of the overall mechanism, where the glassy matrix is permeated by a dense distribution of Ag0, Ag+ and small aggregates, which are the seeds for the formation of the larger particles upon energetic treatments. In these regards, it is observed that a proper choice of laser irradiation conditions, in terms of wavelength and pulse energy, has a direct impact on the occurrence of the overall clustering process, by specifically promoting Ag ion reduction as well as cluster nucleation, growth and fragmentation. This definitely paves the way to efficient strategies for the realization of optical materials based on controlled distribution of metal clusters with finely tuned structural and optical properties.

This study deals with the perspective of circular economy (CE) transition in the Construction and Demolition Waste Management (C&DWM) system of the Metropolitan City of Naples (Italy). It assesses the current building materials stored in the existing buildings and C&DW generation, composition and management, by means of public databases, i-Tree Canopy software and SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats). The final goal is to provide useful feedbacks to the city Administration and stakeholders to increase and improve the management of existing C&DW flows. The statistical database and the use of i-Tree Canopy for geographical assessment point out a large amount of building materials stocked in the existing buildings and potentially available, while results of the SWOT analysis, combined with TOWS matrix, show that the transition to CE in the C&DW management systems in the Metropolitan City of Naples still is at an early stage due to several weaknesses. The latter regard the lack of demand for recycled products, the lack of data in the end-of-life stage of recycling, and the presence of a high fraction of mixed C&DW reflecting the low adoption of reduction measures on C&D sites. Solutions are proposed with the purpose of better realigning the C&DWM system according to the CE principles as well as to increased sustainability.

Thirty years ago, the systems ecologist Howard T. Odum introduced the concept of transformity, which is a thermodynamic measure of quality within the trial and error evolutionary dynamics of ecosystems, namely an indicator of rank in the hierarchical system structure of the biosphere. Based on a global database of individual processes and whole economies, this paper extends, refines, and updates Odum's idea, demonstrating the strength of the postulated relation. In particular, an inverse linear logarithmic relationship is shown to hold between resource quantity (exergy) and quality (emergy), which is the result of an overall energetic efficiency characteristic of energy transformation processes of the biosphere. This relation extends from natural renewable energy sources to human information (including global internet data flows) and know-how embedded in national economies, thus identifying a consistent theory of hierarchical organization of the biosphere grounded in energetics and ultimately setting constraints to illusions of unlimited growth.

Energy is the main driver of human Social-Ecological System (SES) dynamics. Collective energy properties of human SES can be described applying the principles of statistical mechanics: (i) energy consumption repartition; (ii) efficiency; (iii) performance, as efficient power, in relation to the least-action principle. International Energy Agency data are analyzed through the lens of such principles. Declining physical efficiency and growth of power losses emerge from our analysis. Losses mainly depend on intermediate system outputs and non-energy final output. Energy performance at Country level also depends on efficient power consumption. Better and worse performing Countries are identified accordingly. Five policy-relevant areas are identified in relation to the physical principles introduced in this paper: Improve efficiency; Decouple economic growth from environmental degradation; Focus on high value added and labor-intensive sectors; Rationalize inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption; Upgrade the technological capabilities. Coherently with our findings, policies should support the following actions: (1) redefine sectoral energy distribution shares; (2) Improve Country-level performance, if needed; (3) Reduce intermediate outputs and non-energy final output; (4) Reduce resources supply to improve eco-efficiency together with system performance.

(no-technical summary) Virus cause multiple outbreaks, for which comprehensive tailored therapeutic strategies are still missing. Virus and host cell dynamics are strictly connected, and convey in virion assembly to ensure virus spread in the body. Study of the systemic behavior of virus-host interaction at the single-cell level is a scientific challenge, considering the difficulties of using experimental approaches and the limited knowledge of the behavior of emerging novel virus as a collectivity. This work focuses on positive-sense, single-stranded RNA viruses, like human coronaviruses, in their virus-individual host interaction, studying the changes induced in the host cell bioenergetics. A systems-thinking representation, based on stock-flow diagramming of virus-host interaction at the cellular level, is used here for the first time to simulate the system energy dynamics. We found that reducing the energy flow which fuels virion assembly is the most affordable strategy to limit the virus spread, but its efficacy is mitigated by the contemporary inhibition of other flows relevant for the system. Summary Positive-single-strand ribonucleic acid ((+)ssRNA) viruses can cause multiple outbreaks, for which comprehensive tailored therapeutic strategies are still missing. Virus and host cell dynamics are strictly connected, generating a complex dynamics that conveys in virion assembly to ensure virus spread in the body. This work focuses on (+)ssRNA viruses in their virus-individual host interaction, studying the changes induced in the host cell bioenergetics. A systems-thinking representation, based on stock-flow diagramming of virus-host interaction at the cellular level, is used here for the first time to simulate the energy dynamics of the system. By means of a computational simulator based on the systemic diagramming, we identifid host protein recycling and folded-protein synthesis as possible new leverage points. These also address different strategies depending on time setting of the therapeutic procedures. Reducing the energy flow which fuels virion assembly is addressed as the most affordable strategy to limit the virus spread, but its efficacy is mitigated by the contemporary inhibition of other flows relevant for the system. Counterintuitively, targeting RNA replication or virion budding does not give rise to relevant systemic effects, and can possibly contribute to further virus spread. The tested combinations of multiple systemic targets are less efficient in minimizing the stock of virions than targeting only the virion assembly process, due to the systemic configuration and its evolution overtime. Viral load and early addressing (in the first two days from infection) of leverage points are the most effective strategies on stock dynamics to minimize virion assembly and preserve host-cell bioenergetics. As a whole, our work points out the need for a systemic approach to design effective therapeutic strategies that should take in account the dynamic evolution of the system.