• Energy Research

Spatial planning has to deal with trade-offs between various stakeholders’ wishes and needs as part of planning and management of landscapes, natural resources and/or biodiversity. To make ecosystem services (ES) trade-off research more relevant for spatial planning, we propose an analytical framework,which puts stakeholders, their land-use/management choices, their impact on ES and responses at the centre. Based on 24 cases from around the world, we used this framing to analyse the appearance and diversity of real-world ES trade-offs. They cover a wide range of trade-offs related to ecosystem use, including: land-use change, management regimes, technical versus nature-based solutions, natural resource use, and management of species. The ES trade-offs studied featured a complexity that was far greater than what is often described in the ES literature. Influential users and context setters are at the core of the trade-off decision-making, but most of the impact is felt by non-influential users. Provisioning and cultural ES were the most targeted in the studied trade-offs, but regulating ES were the most impacted. Stakeholders’ characteristics, such as influence, impact faced, and concerns can partially explain their position and response in relation to trade-offs. Based on the research findings, we formulate recommendations for spatial planning.

AbstractIndia announced a long‐awaited and much‐needed national biofuel policy in December 2009 with a mandate of achieving 20% blending of bioethanol and biodiesel by 2017. However, while the determination of specific time‐bound targets is a crucial step in the Indian biofuel program, several aspects of the guidelines reflect uncertainty that may render the 20% target unachievable. This perspective traces the rapid changes in political strategies of biofuels in India over the last decade and reviews significant scientific progress, achieved in the same period. Our observation indicates that biofuel policies in India have followed a zigzag course interspersed with several positive initiatives, severely discouraging advocacies and occasional neglect of biofuels. The multiplicity of related policies, each partially addressing biofuel issues have amounted to increasing ambiguity.We present an analysis of the tenets of the current policy with respect to land availability, related land use, and economic and marketing institutions, which are some of the important determinants of success for the Indian biofuel program. Some recommendations emanating from the analysis are (1) to estimate of available land and land use change effects; (2) to build resilience for energy crops towards climate change; and (3) to strengthen marketing and financial mechanisms at grass‐roots level. In conclusion we emphasize the need for timely scientific assessments and the subsequent incorporation into policy formulation to enable India to achieve the overall goal of sustainable biofuel production. © 2010 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Biomass for bioenergy is debated for its potential synergies or tradeoffs with other provisioning and regulating ecosystem services (ESS). This biomass may originate from different production systems and may be purposefully grown or obtained from residues. Increased concerns globally about the sustainable production of biomass for bioenergy has resulted in numerous certification schemes focusing on best management practices, mostly operating at the plot/field scale. In this study, we compare the ESS of two watersheds in the southeastern US. We show the ESS tradeoffs and synergies of plantation forestry, i.e., pine poles, and agricultural production, i.e., wheat straw and corn stover, with the counterfactual natural or semi-natural forest in both watersheds. The plantation forestry showed less distinct tradeoffs than did corn and wheat production, i.e., for carbon storage, P and sediment retention, groundwater recharge, and biodiversity. Using indicators of landscape composition and configuration, we showed that landscape planning can affect the overall ESS supply and can partly determine if locally set environmental thresholds are being met. Indicators on landscape composition, configuration and naturalness explained more than 30% of the variation in ESS supply. Landscape elements such as largely connected forest patches or more complex agricultural patches, e.g., mosaics with shrub and grassland patches, may enhance ESS supply in both of the bioenergy production systems. If tradeoffs between biomass production and other ESS are not addressed by landscape planning, it may be reasonable to include rules in certification schemes that require, e.g., the connectivity of natural or semi-natural forest patches in plantation forestry or semi-natural landscape elements in agricultural production systems. Integrating indicators on landscape configuration and composition into certification schemes is particularly relevant considering that certification schemes are governance tools used to ensure comparable sustainability standards for biomass produced in countries with variable or absent legal frameworks for landscape planning.

Global demand for agricultural and forestry products fundamentally affects regional land-use change associated with environmental impacts (EIs) such as erosion. In contrast to aggregated global metrics such as greenhouse gas (GHG) balances, local/regional EIs of different agricultural and forestry production regions need methods which enable worldwide EI comparisons. The key aspect is to control environmental heterogeneity to reveal man-made differences of EIs between production regions. Environmental heterogeneity is the variation in biotic and abiotic environmental conditions. In the present study, we used three approaches to control environmental heterogeneity: (i) environmental stratification, (ii) potential natural vegetation (PNV), and (iii) regional environmental thresholds to compare EIs of solid biomass production. We compared production regions of managed forests and plantation forests in subtropical (Satilla watershed, Southeastern US), tropical (Rufiji basin, Tanzania), and temperate (Mulde watershed, Central Germany) climates. All approaches supported the comparison of the EIs of different land-use classes between and within production regions. They also standardized the different EIs for a comparison between the EI categories. The EIs for different land-use classes within a production region decreased with increasing degree of naturalness (forest, plantation forestry, and cropland). PNV was the most reliable approach, but lacked feasibility and relevance. The PNV approach explicitly included most of the factors that drive environmental heterogeneity in contrast to the stratification and threshold approaches. The stratification approach allows consistent global application due to available data. Regional environmental thresholds only included arbitrarily selected aspects of environmental heterogeneity; they are only available for few EIs. Especially, the PNV and stratification approaches are options to compare regional EIs of biomass or crop production such as erosion, biodiversity, or water quality impacts worldwide and thereby complement existing metrics assessing global EIs such as GHG emissions.

Meeting the world's growing energy demand through bioenergy production involves extensive land-use change which could have severe environmental and social impacts. Second generation bioenergy feedstocks offer a possible solution to this problem. They have the potential to reduce land-use conflicts between food and bioenergy production as they can be grown on low quality land not suitable for food production. However, a comprehensive impact assessment that considers multiple ecosystem services (ESS) and biodiversity is needed to identify the environmentally best feedstock option, as trade-offs are inherent. In this study, we simulate the spatial distribution of short rotation coppices (SRCs) in the landscape of the Mulde watershed in Central Germany by modeling profit-maximizing farmers under different economic and policy-driven scenarios using a spatially explicit economic simulation model. This allows to derive general insights and a mechanistic understanding of regional-scale impacts on multiple ESS in the absence of large-scale implementation. The modeled distribution of SRCs, required to meet the regional demand of combined heat and power (CHP) plants for solid biomass, had little or no effect on the provided ESS. In the policy-driven scenario, placing SRCs on low or high quality soils to provide ecological focus areas, as required within the Common Agricultural Policy in the EU, had little effect on ESS. Only a substantial increase in the SRC production area, beyond the regional demand of CHP plants, had a relevant effect, namely a negative impact on food production as well as a positive impact on biodiversity and regulating ESS. Beneficial impacts occurred for single ESS. However, the number of sites with balanced ESS supply hardly increased due to larger shares of SRCs in the landscape. Regression analyses showed that the occurrence of sites with balanced ESS supply was more strongly driven by biophysical factors than by the SRC share in the landscape. This indicates that SRCs negligibly affect trade-offs between individual ESS. Coupling spatially explicit economic simulation models with environmental and ESS assessment models can contribute to a comprehensive impact assessment of bioenergy feedstocks that have not yet been planted.

The planned expansion of biofuel plantations in Brazil could potentially cause both direct and indirect land-use changes (e.g., biofuel plantations replace rangelands, which replace forests). In this study, we use a spatially explicit model to project land-use changes caused by that expansion in 2020, assuming that ethanol (biodiesel) production increases by 35 (4) x 109liter in the 2003-2020 period. Our simulations show that direct land-use changes will have a small impact on carbon emissions because most biofuel plantations would replace rangeland areas. However, indirect land-use changes, especially those pushing the rangeland frontier into the Amazonian forests, could offset the carbon savings from biofuels. Sugarcane ethanol and soybean biodiesel each contribute to nearly half of the projected indirect deforestation of 121,970 km2by 2020, creating a carbon debt that would take about 250 years to be repaid using these biofuels instead of fossil fuels. We also tested different crops that could serve as feedstock to fulfill Brazil’s biodiesel demand and found that oil palm would cause the least land-use changes and associated carbon debt. The modeled livestock density increases by 0.09 head per hectare. But a higher increase of 0.13 head per hectare in the average livestock density throughout the country could avoid the indirect land-use changes caused by biofuels (even with soybean as the biodiesel feedstock), while still fulfilling all food and bioenergy demands. We suggest that a closer collaboration or strengthened institutional link between the biofuel and cattle-ranching sectors in the coming years is crucial for effective carbon savings from biofuels in Brazil.