Assessing biofuels: Aiming for sustainable development or complying with the market?

Socio-economic impacts of Brazilian sugarcane industry

“…In addition, compliance with environmental and social requirements has begun to influence the strategies and investments in the ethanol sector, which seeks to export ethanol to the United States and the European Union (Moraes & Zilberman, 2014;Diaz-Chavez, 2011). The next section presents the methodology for assessing indicators based on secondary data from two regions in Brazil.…”

“…Different indicators can be used to assess socioeconomic issues (Garcia de Oliveira, 2010;Diaz-Chavez, 2011Rutz and Jansen, 2014). A number of indicators have been derived from both national (e.g.…”

“…Potential benefits that bioenergy production include rural and economic development, energy security, and improvement of balance of payments (Lynd and Woods, 2011;Diaz-Chavez, 2011;Walter et al, 2008). Other social benefits include job creation and enabling access to the labor market by people with little or no education, provision of training and skills certification, labour market regulation (Sallum, 2007;Moraes and Zilberman, 2014;DiazChavez, 2014).…”

Understanding sustainable biofuel development: a sub-Saharan Africa perspective

“…The study of poverty is a significant concern when understanding that people on the verge of starvation, when seeking new land, are unlikely to consider the state of natural bushland, or in the pursuit of sustenance, the rarity of an animal. These concerns may be exacerbated by biofuel development in subSaharan Africa, unless projects strive to consider affected stakeholder concerns equally (Diaz Chavez, 2011;Vermeulen and Cotula, 2010).…”

“…These need to exist in harmony for the total system to be sustainable (Hecht, 2007), although they are complicated by their complex relationships and interactions with uneven levels of political and economic power across varying temporal and spatial scales. Driven largely by political and institutional organisations and activities across different scales, many policies have been developed to guide the quest towards sustainability (Diaz-Chavez, 2011). Morrissey et al (2012) affirm that although policy initiatives at local, regional, national and international levels are important in moving towards sustainability, project specific approaches are equally significant.…”