Environmental impact assessment of energy crops cultivation in Europe

Abstract

The production of energy crops must be studied and evaluated in terms of environmental impact, in order to integrate them into a sustainable agricultural development. As bioenergy carriers they offer ecological advantages over fossil fuels by contributing to the reduction of greenhouse gases and acidifying emissions. However, there could be ecological shortcomings related to the intensity of agricultural production. There is a risk of polluting water and air, losing soil quality, enhancing erosion, and reducing biodiversity. In the scope of the project Future Crops for Food, Feed, Fiber and Fuel (4F Crops), supported by the European Union, an environmental impact assessment study was developed and applied to the production of potential energy crops in Europe. The following variables were selected as categories: use of water and mineral resources, soil quality and erosion, emission of minerals and pesticides to soil and water, waste generation and utilization, landscape, and biodiversity. In addition, a normalization and weighting procedure was applied, which attempts to aggregate environmental impacts. Results suggest that growing energy crops does not infl ict higher impact on the environment compared to potato and wheat farming (regarding the studied categories). Although the different indicators did not yield a common pattern, overall results suggest that woody and lignocellulosic crops have an advantage over annual crop systems, namely regarding erodibility and biodiversity. Some crop management options, such as pesticides and fertilizers inputs, can infl uence the outcomes.However, site-specifi c factors should be accurately assessed to evaluate the adequacy between crop and location.Environmental hotspots in the systems are detected and options for improvement are presented.

Bioenergy from “surplus” land: environmental and socio-economic implications

“…Owing to its shallow and extensive root network and its ability to accumulate heavy metals and other pollutants, willow and poplar SRC may be used for remediation of contaminated land and treatment of wastewater (Börjesson 1999a;Rosenqvist and Dawson 2005). The same was also reported for other energy crops, such as Miscanthus, giant reed, hemp, sorghum and sunflower (Fernando et al 2010, and references within).…”

“…Water footprints might thus arise from the use of an area for bioenergy and from feedstock processing, potentially leading to conflicts with other types of land use or (non-marketable) ecosystem services if water is scarce (Bhardwaj et al 2011;Fritsche et al 2010). Therefore, water-demanding energy crops should be allocated to regions with high effective water availability (Fernando et al 2010). …”

“…The challenges of sustainability require making use of existing knowledge about feedstock management, feedstock type, feedstock location, feedstock extent, environmental attributes, original habitat conditions, use of water and mineral resources, soil quality and erosion, emission of minerals and pesticides to soil and water, waste generation and utilization, biodiversity, expected price and cost developments, and response of local farmers and society in general (Dale et al 2010;Fernando et al 2010). Given this long list of sustainability criteria and given the rapid pace of land-use change, development of future options requires preparation for uncertainty (Jackson et al 2010).…”

RELCA: a REgional Life Cycle inventory for Assessing bioenergy systems within a region

“…This has resulted in a scattering of decentralised bioenergy plants across the landscape, mainly due to their dependency on spatially diffuse biomass resources. Such configurations of biomass and bioenergy technologies in the landscape make the influence of bioenergy production obvious to the eye (e.g., maize and biogas plant dominated landscapes [4]) and thus open to scrutiny for a broad list of potential environmental burdens 1 , to soil, to water, and land use [5][6][7][8]. In general, life cycle assessment (LCA) is the most popular assessment approach used for investigating the environmental burdens associated with bioenergy production [9][10][11].…”

“…1), they identified three regional contexts which have been used to frame regionally focused life cycle thinking. With many burdens of bioenergy production strongly influenced by the regional variability (e.g., management, climate, soil) of biomass production [5,6,23,24,[26][27][28], O'Keeffe et al [19] identified the need to begin determining what is happening "within" a regional context for a bioenergy producing region. They also identified that life cycle thinking framed in a regionally contextualised manner is at a nascent stage, particularly with regard to implementing a suitable or appropriate life cycle impact assessment phase 4 .…”