Abstract
Research addressing non-food biomass production from the perspective of land-use change and environmental impacts has expanded considerably since 2008. An exhaustive literature review followed by the identification within the resulting corpus of all references seeking to quantify the consumption of nonrenewable resources yielded 29 articles, which were then examined in detail. Our goal was to describe, as precisely as possible, the methods and results of published research addressing land use change as it relates to the consumption of nonrenewable resources. We found that these articles were in fact more focused on the assessment of other environmental impacts, primarily greenhouse gas impacts, with fossil-fuel use appearing as a collateral result. All the articles employed a life cycle analysis approach; all considered the question of fossil-fuel consumption; and all concluded that a reduction in fossil fuel use was achieved through the substitution of biomass energy. According to the findings of this sub-corpus, biofuels produced from lignocellulosic biomass appear to be most effective in terms of reducing environmental impacts, but few direct comparisons with first-generation biofuels have been made. In general, differences in methodologies and in the assumptions adopted for different studies, particularly with respect to land-use change parameters, make comparisons among the selected studies difficult.
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Acknowledgments
This work was funded by the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (ADEME) and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry under grant contract 12-60-C0004. Assistance from Sophie Le Perchec (INRA Rennes) in the literature search is acknowledged, as well as the following scientists who contributed to the detailed analysis of the scientific articles: Laure Bamière (INRA Grignon), Aude Barbottin (INRA Grignon), Valentin Bellassen (INRA Dijon), Martial Bernoux (IRD Montpellier), Cécile Bessou (CIRAD Montpellier), Antonio Bispo (ADEME Angers), François Chiron (AgroParisTech, Orsay), Stéphane De Cara (INRA Grignon), Guillaume Décocq (Univ. Picardie Jules-Vernes, Amiens), Jean-François Dhôte (INRA Nancy), Monia El Akkari (INRA Paris), Nathalie Frascaria (AgroParisTech, Orsay), Sabrina Gaba (INRA Dijon), Benoît Gabrielle (AgroParisTech, Grignon), Philippe Lescoat (AgroParisTech, Paris), David Makowski (INRA Grignon), Olivier Réchauchère (INRA Paris), Julie Wohlfahrt (INRA Mirecourt).
The author would also like to thank two anonymous readers for their insightful comments, which made it possible to improve the quality of this article.
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Dumas, P. (2018). Review of the Impacts on Nonrenewable Resources of Land-Use Changes Induced by Non-food Biomass Production. In: Réchauchère, O., Bispo, A., Gabrielle, B., Makowski, D. (eds) Sustainable Agriculture Reviews 30. Sustainable Agriculture Reviews, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96289-4_9
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