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Future projections indicate an expansion for both food and energy demands, which can increase pressure on land use, while there is an urgent global need for climate change mitigation. Bioenergy is foreseen as key option to meet future energy demands and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, however its sustainability depends on locations and regional characteristics. Simultaneously, agricultural production models that co-produce food, feed, and energy offer sustainability synergies and co-benefits, but site-specific sustainability assessments of their large-scale implementation are missing. This study presents a bottom-up approach to assess spatially explicit sustainability aspects of bioenergy-livestock integrated systems (BLI) in Brazil and shed light on their contribution to future energy demands, to climate change mitigation targets, and their impacts on selected ecosystem services, including bioenergy production, climate change mitigation, reduction of food competition, biodiversity conservation, and avoided deforestation. The proposed integration considers livestock intensification and use of biofuels by-products as animal feed supplement, taking advantage of synergies between these two value chains. The expansion of the BLI system in the Center-South region of Brazil produce up to 89 billion liters of ethanol, enough to meet future domestic ethanol demands from multiple shared socioeconomic pathways and generating surpluses for export. This production takes place on 16 million hectares of pastureland within the Sugarcane Agroecological Zoning, excluding the Amazon and Pantanal biomes, and biodiversity hotspots. BLI expansion mitigate up to 250 million tonnes of CO 2 eq and generate 15 billion dollars of profits. The best locations to maximize the selected ecosystem services are west of São Paulo, east of Mato Grosso do Sul, and the south-central region of the states of Goiás. This study may encourage the formulation of enhanced public policies for the integration of bioenergy and livestock value chains and guide a sustainable large-scale deployment of BLI systems. • Bioenergy and livestock integration (BLI): co-production of food, feed and energy. • BLI systems: 89 billion liters of ethanol and 250 million tonnes of CO 2 eq mitigated. • Enough ethanol to meet future Brazilian demands and surplus to be exported. • Biomass expansion only on pastureland inside Sugarcane Agroecological Zoning. • Without land displacement and deforestation of native vegetation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generation of goods and services are highly dependent on the use of natural resources. Until very recently, there was an implicit belief that the physical expansion of the economic system could be unlimited, as if the planet would have conditions and time enough to recover and continue to supply resources. This belief implies a confidence in an economic system that would provide whatever is necessary for a continuous growing production and consumption. Even believing that technology alone is not enough to solve the current environmental problems, it is certain that it can collaborate to mitigate climate change and to adaptation to changes in the environment. By bringing environmental aspects into discussions, eco-innovations can affect and transform the innovation system in order to create sustainable processes. However, the main challenge towards the transition to a more sustainable, cleaner and more equitable society is to set innovation in a new context, as until very recently it only considered the economic variables. This change means to value the social and environmental dimension of the innovation. In addition to eco-innovation, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is spreading in the industrial environment, offering promising perspectives. LCA is considered a valuable methodology in the environmental sustainability of industry. In this context, the present study addresses LCA and its relationship with the generation of eco-innovations. Drawing on contributions from literature on eco-innovation and LCA, the paper analyses available evidence on this relationship in a context of the transition towards sustainable development. To structure the debate, the paper offers a conceptual approach and an illustrative case on international researchers' and practitioners’ perceptions on the potentially positive relationship between eco-innovation and LCA. The study gathers data in the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection and in Scopus, in order to provide a picture of the distribution of documents retrieved from these databases, dealing with both eco-innovation and LCA topics. The paper concludes that the convergence of the eco-innovation and LCA studies is quite plausible, but at least in its initial phase, the literature that unites both themes is scarcely found in publications in the area of innovation, being more frequent in the area of engineering and management that usually addresses LCA studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wood and bark chip mulch has been shown to reduce net orchard greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions on an Okanagan Valley (British Columbia, Canada) apple orchard. However, this benefit was shown to be outweighed by the (attributional) life cycle impacts associated with mulch production. The current study expanded the scope of prior investigations to perform a consequential life cycle assessment of the impacts of increasing wood chip/bark mulch use in the production of apples on Okanagan orchards. This assessment included the impacts of the orchard system as well as other current alternative uses of wood chip/bark mulch which included bioenergy production and paper manufacturing. Many environmental impact categories were examined including human toxicity, freshwater aquatic ecotoxicity, depletion of abiotic resources (elements, ultimate reserves), photochemical oxidation, ozone layer depletion, terrestrial ecotoxicity, acidification potential, climate change, eutrophication, land use – land competition, and energy use (including non-renewable: fossil, nuclear, primary forest; and renewable: biomass, geothermal, solar, water and wind). One scenario was modelled to represent the case in which no mulch was used on orchards (only used for alternative products). A second model was created to represent the marginal impacts of adding the amount of mulch to an apple orchard necessary to produce 1 kg of apples (0.575 kg bark and 0.144 kg wood chips). These amounts of bark and wood chips were assumed to be taken away from their current alternative uses (co-generation for bark and paper production for wood chips), thereby decreasing the amount of electricity and heat produced by bark by 0.653 kWh electricity and 0.653 MJ heat, and the amount of paper produced by wood chips by 0.144 kg paper. In turn, these amounts of electricity, heat and paper were assumed to be produced by their marginal production technologies – hydro-electric generation for electricity, natural gas for heat, and recycled paper for paper production. Finally, the scenarios were modelled assuming the marginal market for co-generation from bark was in Washington, USA rather than the Okanagan, as a sensitivity analysis. The results did not show a clear environmental benefit to either using or not using mulch on orchards. In the scenario in which bark mulch was assumed to be used either on apple orchards or for co-generation in British Columbia, impacts in 14 categories (including climate change, eutrophication, acidification, all toxicities, land use and some renewable energy use) were lower when mulch was used on the orchard, and results for 5 categories (including some non-renewable and renewable resources/energy use) were higher. When bark mulch was assumed to be used either on orchards or for co-generation in Washington, terrestrial ecotoxicity, land use, biomass and solar energy use were lower when mulch was used on the orchard, and all others (15 categories) were higher. There was a large amount of uncertainty in the model, coming from data variability, data quality and impact assessment uncertainty. Overall, the orchard system played a significant role in the impact assessment results, and was the main contributor to the overall uncertainty. Based on these results, mulch use on orchards cannot be recommended to reduce environmental impacts, but the marginal impacts of using mulch warrant further investigation. • Wood/bark mulch can reduce direct greenhouse gas emissions on orchards. • Increased use of mulch on orchards would decrease its use in energy and paper production. • Impacts of energy and paper production without mulch are variable. • Overall net impacts of mulch use on orchards depend on displaced alternative uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]