Page 67 - Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

60 Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

non-cancer; ecotoxicity, freshwater; land use; water use; resource use, min-
erals and metals; and resource use, fossils, ionizing radiation, ozone depletion
(EC, 2017).
However, some limitations still exist in the models used for assessing the
impacts and some impacts are still not completely captured.
Regarding biofuels assessment, a number of improvements will be
needed in support to current models and methods.
In the land use modeling there is the need both of assessing more com-
prehensively impact on soil quality properties (Vidal Legaz et al., 2017; De
Laurentiis et al., 2019) and to rely on a better basis for assessing biodiversity
loss due to habitat changes (Curran et al., 2016; Chaudhary et al., 2016).
Biodiversity is indeed considered a pivotal impact which assessment should
be more systematically addressed (Koh and Ghazoul, 2008), including the
role of deforestation and global changes related to biofuels expansion
(Keles et al., 2018).
In the water use modeling, the impact assessment model recommended
by the United Nation for Environment and Setac (UNEP-SETAC) life
cycle initiative is the AWARE model (Boulay et al., 2018). The model
requires data with spatial and temporal details which are very often not avail-
able in life cycle inventories, basically hampering a more specific assessment
of water scarcity-related impacts. The development of archetypes may help
to overcome the need of very detailed spatially and temporally resolved
input data. Scenarios could be run to explore the domain of variability of
results and to highlight in which context (as combination of spatial and tem-
poral dimensions) they provide the worst or the best conditions.
Regarding the ecotoxicity potentially associated with the agricultural
stage of feedstock, toxicity models are considered still in need of improve-
ments in terms of substance coverage and comprehensiveness of impacts
covered (Saouter et al., 2017a,b). A recent work by the European Commis-
sion’s Joint Research Centre has focused on improving the toxicity evalu-
ation, in terms of number of substances that could be assessed and updating
the calculation principles (Saouter et al., 2018). For example, there are
increasing concerns related to the loss of ecosystem services, such as polli-
nation. Currently, attempts are ongoing to ensure pollinators are included
in the LCA framework (Crenna et al., 2017). In general, more ecological
consideration on feedstock production and biofuels production is needed,
including the assessment of the carrying capacity of ecosystems (Martire
et al., 2015) as well as the accounting of the environmental impacts associ-
ated to biotic resources use (Crenna et al., 2018).