Page 53 - Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

CHAPTER 3

Triple bottom line, sustainability

and sustainability assessment,

an overview

Serenella Sala
European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra, Italy

Contents

1 Introduction 47
2 State of the art in sustainability assessment 50
3 Biofuels and sustainable development goals 54
4 Environmental sustainability 56
4.1 Life cycle assessment 57
4.2 Comprehensive evaluation of environmental impacts 59
4.3 Absolute sustainability: Assessing biofuels in light of planetary boundaries 61
4.4 The nexus challenges: Assessing interplays and interdependencies
between food, energy, land, water, and ecosystems 61
4.5 Closing the loop: A circular bioeconomy to foster the use of
sustainable feedstocks 62
5 Social sustainability 63
5.1 Governance-related challenges in the biofuels domain 65
6 Economic sustainability 65
7 Conclusions 66
References 67

1 Introduction
Over the years, the concept and practice of sustainable development has
been continuously evolving. Indeed, the greatest challenge that humanity
faces today is to plan and carry out human activities in a manner compatible
with the Earth’s limits.
Despite the fact that the concept of sustainable development has been
developed and studied for several decades, its practical application is still lim-
ited and many targets have not been met. This means humanity is still oper-
ating unsustainably, and there are clear and ample implications of continued
unsustainable production and consumption.

Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future © 2020 Elsevier Inc.
https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815581-3.00003-8 All rights reserved. 47