Title:
Food Deprival Footprint and Nitrogen-Related Carbon Intensity: Two Sustainability Indicators for Dedicated Energy Crops
Author(s):
Ceotto, E., Di Candilo, M.
Document(s):
Paper
Abstract:
Environmental indicators are synthetic variables, specifically conceived for aggregating relevant information about agroecosystems. The assessment of sustainability for bioenergy cropping systems might be improved by specific indicators, because the diffusion of these systems raised novel scientific points, notably: i) the demand of biofuels compete for cropland against the demand for food production and nature conservation; ii) the intensive agricultural management, needed to sustain productivity of bioenergy crops, might negate the greenhouse gases benefits of replacing fossil fuels. In particular most of the criticism is concentrated on the use of industrial nitrogen fertilizers used to support the productivity of bioenergy crops. The scope of the present study is to propose two indicators of sustainability, which take into account, respectively, the amount of food production displaced per unit energy produced with biomass, and the indirect greenhouse gas emissions, attributable to industrial nitrogen fertilizers, per unit of energy produced with biomass. The indicators presented here were calculated for a field experiment on dedicated lignocellulosic bionergy crops located in the Low Po Valley, Northern Italy.
Keywords:
CO2 emission, food, impact, land use
Topic:
Policies and ensuring sustainability
Subtopic:
Assessment of secondary effects of bioenergy
Event:
18th European Biomass Conference and Exhibition
Session:
VP5.4.2
Pages:
2286 - 2289
ISBN-13:
978-88-89407-56-1
ISBN-10:
88-89407-56-5
Paper DOI:
10.5071/18thEUBCE2010-VP5.4.2
Price:
FREE
