Page 294 - Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

260 Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

According to Di Cesare et al. (2018), social impact assessment is increas-
ingly important in business and public policy contexts. Indeed, as key chal-
lenges for sustainable development, the United Nations Millennium
Development Goals cover global social issues, from halving extreme poverty
rates to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary
education. In addition, composite indicators such as the Human Develop-
ment Index (HDI) and other sets of indicators are important for measuring
progress toward sustainability, including social aspects, in order to under-
stand how sociopolitical and economic systems are developing. However,
the challenges in social impact assessment are related to the intrinsic difficul-
ties of unanimously defining what is socially desirable and acceptable.
According to the authors, focusing on social aspects, it is clear that not only
the negative impacts are of interest, but also the positive impacts that can
derive from a specific human intervention. When researching appropriate
indicators for sustainability assessment, consideration should be given to
its ability to guide policies and decisions at all levels of society (town, city,
county, state, region, nation, continent, and world). Indeed, in the context
of public policies, social indicators are an important tool for assessing the
level of social development of countries and for assessing the current impact
and where the research should focus.

2.1 Social aspects and stakeholders in the production of
biofuels

According to Freeman (1984), over the years, companies have been chang-
ing their level of complexity and the external environment has become a
concern as well. For the author, the managers need to define new strategies
for each type of group that has influence on the income of the organizations,
demanding a better understanding about the identity and characteristics of
this group, known as stakeholders. As Moore (2001) reveals, in the midst
of many concepts, the literature considers stakeholder employees, suppliers,
shareholders, clients, and the community. For Donaldson and Preston
(1995), stakeholders are people or groups of people with legitimate interests
in the processes or impacts of the company’s activities.
In this context, according to Iofrida et al. (2016), the SLCA was concep-
tualized in an engineering environment, since it is the main field of study for
scholars and professionals of the environmental life cycle assessment (ELCA).
However, the inherent nature of impacts on assessment is different in SLCA
than in ELCA, since it is designed to analyze environmental impacts (linked
to the natural sciences) and the first to analyze social impacts (belonging to