Keith L. Kline

Interactions among bioenergy feedstock choices, landscape dynamics, and land use

Landscape implications of bioenergy feedstock choices are significant and depend on land-use practices and their environmental impacts. Although land-use changes and carbon emissions associated with bioenergy feedstock production are dynamic and complicated, lignocellulosic feedstocks may offer opportunities that enhance sustainability when compared to other transportation fuel alternatives. For bioenergy sustainability, major drivers and concerns revolve around energy security, food production, land productivity, soil carbon and erosion, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity, air quality, and water quantity and quality. The many implications of bioenergy feedstock choices require several indicators at multiple scales to provide a more complete accounting of effects. Ultimately, the long-term sustainability of bioenergy feedstock resources (as well as food supplies) throughout the world depends on land-use practices and landscape dynamics. Land-management decisions often invoke trade-offs among potential environmental effects and social and economic factors as well as future opportunities for resource use. The hypothesis being addressed in this paper is that sustainability of bioenergy feedstock production can be achieved via appropriately designed crop residue and perennial lignocellulosic systems. We find that decision makers need scientific advancements and adequate data that both provide quantitative and qualitative measures of the effects of bioenergy feedstock choices at different spatial and temporal scales and allow fair comparisons among available options for renewable liquid fuels.

Environmental Indicators of Biofuel Sustainability: What About Context?

Indicators of the environmental sustainability of biofuel production, distribution, and use should be selected, measured, and interpreted with respect to the context in which they are used. The context of a sustainability assessment includes the purpose, the particular biofuel production and distribution system, policy conditions, stakeholder values, location, temporal influences, spatial scale, baselines, and reference scenarios. We recommend that biofuel sustainability questions be formulated with respect to the context, that appropriate indicators of environmental sustainability be developed or selected from more generic suites, and that decision makers consider context in ascribing meaning to indicators. In addition, considerations such as technical objectives, varying values and perspectives of stakeholder groups, indicator cost, and availability and reliability of data need to be understood and considered. Sustainability indicators for biofuels are most useful if adequate historical data are available, information can be collected at appropriate spatial and temporal scales, organizations are committed to use indicator information in the decision-making process, and indicators can effectively guide behavior toward more sustainable practices.

The land use-climate change-energy nexus.

Landscape ecology focuses on the spatial patterns and processes of ecological and human interactions. These patterns and processes are being altered by both changing resource-management practices of humans and changing climate conditions associated, in part, with increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. Dominant resource-extraction and land-management activities involve energy, and the use of fossil energy is one of the key drivers behind increasing greenhouse gas emissions as well as land-use changes. Alternative energy sources (such as wind, solar, nuclear, and bioenergy) are being explored to reduce greenhouse gas emission rates. Yet, energy production, including alternative-energy options, can have a wide range of effects on land productivity, surface cover, albedo, and other factors that affect carbon, water, and energy fluxes and, in turn, climate. Meanwhile, climate influences the potential output, relative efficiencies, and sustainability of alternative energy sources. Thus, land use, climate change, and energy choices are linked, and any comprehensive analysis in landscape ecology that considers one of these factors should be cognizant of these interactions. This analysis explores the implications of linkages between land use, climate hange, and energy and points out ecological patterns and processes that may be affected by their interactions.

Take a Closer Look: Biofuels Can Support Environmental, Economic and Social Goals

The US Congress passed the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) seven years ago. Since then, biofuels have gone from darling to scapegoat for many environmentalists, policy makers, and the general public. The reasons for this shift are complex and include concerns about environmental degradation, uncertainties about impact on food security, new access to fossil fuels, and overly optimistic timetables. As a result, many people have written off biofuels. However, numerous studies indicate that biofuels, if managed sustainably, can help solve pressing environmental, social and economic problems (Figure 1). The scientific and policy communities should take a closer look by reviewing the key assumptions underlying opposition to biofuels and carefully consider the probable alternatives. Liquid fuels based on fossil raw materials are likely to come at increasing environmental cost. Sustainable futures require energy conservation, increased efficiency, and alternatives to fossil fuels, including biofuels.

Reconciling food security and bioenergy: priorities for action

Understanding the complex interactions among food security, bioenergy sustainability, and resource management requires a focus on specific contextual problems and opportunities. The United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals place a high priority on food and energy security; bioenergy plays an important role in achieving both goals. Effective food security programs begin by clearly defining the problem and asking, ‘What can be done to assist people at high risk?’ Simplistic global analyses, headlines, and cartoons that blame biofuels for food insecurity may reflect good intentions but mislead the public and policymakers because they obscure the main drivers of local food insecurity and ignore opportunities for bioenergy to contribute to solutions. Applying sustainability guidelines to bioenergy will help achieve near‐ and long‐term goals to eradicate hunger. Priorities for achieving successful synergies between bioenergy and food security include the following: (1) clarifying communications with clear and consistent terms, (2) recognizing that food and bioenergy need not compete for land and, instead, should be integrated to improve resource management, (3) investing in technology, rural extension, and innovations to build capacity and infrastructure, (4) promoting stable prices that incentivize local production, (5) adopting flex crops that can provide food along with other products and services to society, and (6) engaging stakeholders to identify and assess specific opportunities for biofuels to improve food security. Systematic monitoring and analysis to support adaptive management and continual improvement are essential elements to build synergies and help society equitably meet growing demands for both food and energy.

A landscape perspective on sustainability of agricultural systems

Agricultural sustainability considers the effects of farm activities on social, economic, and environmental conditions at local and regional scales. Adoption of more sustainable agricultural practices entails defining sustainability, developing easily measured indicators of sustainability, moving toward integrated agricultural systems, and offering incentives or imposing regulations to affect farmer behavior. Landscape ecology is an informative discipline in considering sustainability because it provides theory and methods for dealing with spatial heterogeneity, scaling, integration, and complexity. To move toward more sustainable agriculture, we propose adopting a systems perspective, recognizing spatial heterogeneity, integrating landscape-design principles and addressing the influences of context, such as the particular products and their distribution, policy background, stakeholder values, location, temporal influences, spatial scale, and baseline conditions. Topics that need further attention at local and regional scales include (1) protocols for quantifying material and energy flows; (2) standard specifications for management practices and corresponding effects; (3) incentives and disincentives for enhancing economic, environmental, and social conditions (including financial, regulatory and other behavioral motivations); (4) integrated landscape planning and management; (5) monitoring and assessment; (6) effects of societal demand; and (7) integrative policies for promoting agricultural sustainability.

Family history of hypertension: a psychophysiological analysis

Family history of hypertension (positive and negative) and gender groups were compared on cardiovascular responses at rest, during stressors and during recovery. Two tasks were employed, mental arithmetic and an anger recall interview. Both levels and reactivity measures of blood pressure, heart rate, cardiac output and total peripheral resistance were included. In addition, participants filled out several questionnaires measuring state feelings during the task and recovery periods, trait anger/hostility and emotions. Both men and women with a positive family history of hypertension exhibited higher tonic levels of blood pressure and heart rate at rest, recovery and during both tasks. They also exhibited greater heart rate reactivity during the mental arithmetic task and greater blood pressure reactivity to both tasks when post-math recovery, but not initial rest, was used as a covariate. Positive family history individuals reported less trust and gregariousness, more depression and aggression, less awareness of somatic responses to the tasks and less effort to relax during the post-task rest periods. Finally, significant correlations were found between low anger expression how anger experience and high anger control and task SBP levels in positive family history individuals.

Good Policy Follows Good Science Using Criteria and Indicators for Assessing Sustainable Biofuel Production

Developing scientific criteria and indicators should play a critical role in charting a sustainable path for the rapidly developing biofuel industry. The challenge ahead in developing such criteria and indicators is to address the limitations on data and modeling.

Cultivated hay and fallow/idle cropland confound analysis of grassland conversion in the Western Corn Belt

The conclusions of a recent study by Wright and Wimberly (1) suggesting that corn/soy cultivation in the Western Corn Belt (WCB) “threatens grasslands” are questionable because of the methods and data used. The study (1) compared National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) Cropland Data Layer (CDL) for 2006 with CDL for 2011 (2) and found 530,000 ha of net “grassland conversion” to corn/soy. The study (1) labeled over 3.5 million ha of CDL cropland (alfalfa, other/hay, and fallow/idle) as “grassland” in 2006 and then improperly counted any corn/soy rotation to that land in 2011 as “grassland conversion.” The study also failed to mention that total “grassland” area as defined in the study (1) grew by 1.6 million ha from 2006 to 2011, continuing a 20-y trend of net grassland expansion across the northern plains (3).

Comparing Scales of Environmental Effects from Gasoline and Ethanol Production

Understanding the environmental effects of alternative fuel production is critical to characterizing the sustainability of energy resources to inform policy and regulatory decisions. The magnitudes of these environmental effects vary according to the intensity and scale of fuel production along each step of the supply chain. We compare the spatial extent and temporal duration of ethanol and gasoline production processes and environmental effects based on a literature review and then synthesize the scale differences on space–time diagrams. Comprehensive assessment of any fuel-production system is a moving target, and our analysis shows that decisions regarding the selection of spatial and temporal boundaries of analysis have tremendous influences on the comparisons. Effects that strongly differentiate gasoline and ethanol-supply chains in terms of scale are associated with when and where energy resources are formed and how they are extracted. Although both gasoline and ethanol production may result in negative environmental effects, this study indicates that ethanol production traced through a supply chain may impact less area and result in more easily reversed effects of a shorter duration than gasoline production.