23
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      The water-land-food nexus of first-generation biofuels

      research-article

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Recent energy security strategies, investment opportunities and energy policies have led to an escalation in biofuel consumption at the expenses of food crops and pastureland. To evaluate the important impacts of biofuels on food security, the food-energy nexus needs to be investigated in the context of its linkages with the overall human appropriation of land and water resources. Here we provide a global assessment of biofuel crop production, reconstruct global patterns of biofuel crop/oil trade and determine the associated displacement of water and land use. We find that bioethanol is mostly produced with domestic crops while 36% of biodiesel consumption relies on international trade, mainly from Southeast Asia. Altogether, biofuels rely on about 2-3% of the global water and land used for agriculture, which could feed about 30% of the malnourished population. We evaluate the food-energy tradeoff and the impact an increased reliance on biofuel would have on the number of people the planet can feed.

          Related collections

          Most cited references19

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Article: not found

          How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the world

            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: not found

            Global land use change, economic globalization, and the looming land scarcity.

            A central challenge for sustainability is how to preserve forest ecosystems and the services that they provide us while enhancing food production. This challenge for developing countries confronts the force of economic globalization, which seeks cropland that is shrinking in availability and triggers deforestation. Four mechanisms-the displacement, rebound, cascade, and remittance effects-that are amplified by economic globalization accelerate land conversion. A few developing countries have managed a land use transition over the recent decades that simultaneously increased their forest cover and agricultural production. These countries have relied on various mixes of agricultural intensification, land use zoning, forest protection, increased reliance on imported food and wood products, the creation of off-farm jobs, foreign capital investments, and remittances. Sound policies and innovations can therefore reconcile forest preservation with food production. Globalization can be harnessed to increase land use efficiency rather than leading to uncontrolled land use expansion. To do so, land systems should be understood and modeled as open systems with large flows of goods, people, and capital that connect local land use with global-scale factors.
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: not found
              • Article: not found

              Redefining agricultural yields: from tonnes to people nourished per hectare

                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Journal
                Sci Rep
                Sci Rep
                Scientific Reports
                Nature Publishing Group
                2045-2322
                03 March 2016
                2016
                : 6
                : 22521
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Departiment of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32 , I-20133 Milan, Italy
                [2 ]Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia , 291 McCormick Rd., Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA
                [3 ]National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, University of Maryland , Annapolis, MD 21401, USA.
                Author notes
                Article
                srep22521
                10.1038/srep22521
                4776133
                26936679
                700e8e8c-a3a1-4d0d-a8e6-6584bba42d10
                Copyright © 2016, Macmillan Publishers Limited

                This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

                History
                : 26 March 2015
                : 17 February 2016
                Categories
                Article

                Uncategorized
                Uncategorized

                Comments

                Comment on this article