Large-scale land acquisition in Africa has been the concern and the focus of growing global literature on land grabbing. The upswing in biofuel investments in Ghana led to large-scale land acquisitions by the private sector presided over by chiefs. This research investigates how chiefs, in...

Many observers view Jatropha as a miracle plant that grows in harsh environments, halts land degradation and provides seeds for fuel production. This makes it particularly attractive for use in Ethiopia, where poverty levels are high and the degradation of agricultural land is widespread. In...

Biofuel plantations have been hyped as a means to reinvigorate Africa’s rural areas. Yet there is still apprehension about the negative environmental and social impacts of large-scale commercial biofuel production around rising food prices, land grabbing, ecological damage, and disruption of...

The use of biofuels to mitigate global carbon emissions is highly dependent on direct and indirect land use changes (LUC). The direct LUC (dLUC) can be accurately evaluated using remote sensing images. In this work we evaluated the dLUC of about 4 million hectares of sugarcane expanded from...

Tourism and its “midwife”, aviation, are transnational sectors exposed to global uncertainties. This scenario-building exercise considers a specific subset of these uncertainties, namely the impact of the evolving global climate change regime on long-haul tourism (LHT), with a 2050 horizon....

Jatropha is the latest in a list of “miracle crops” that have been promoted in southern Africa for their perceived development benefits. This was based on promises of high yields, low water requirement, ability to grow on marginal land and lack of competition with food. In less than 10...

The need for integrated methodological framework for sustainability assessment has been widely discussed and is urgent due to increasingly complex environmental system problems. These problems have impacts on ecosystems and human well-being which represent a threat to economic performance of...

About 130 studies were analyzed to compare farm-level energy use and global warming potential (GWP) of organic and conventional production sectors. Cross cutting issues such as tillage, compost, soil carbon sequestration and energy offsets were also reviewed. Finally, we contrasted E and GWP...

Strategies for sustainably using biofuels must be thoroughly assessed at several levels. First, the use of biofuels must comply with sustainable development’s main dimensions. Second, the use of biofuels must comply with sustainable transport’s main dimensions. Third, gains from using...

In the present work, the results are reported of the energy and exergy analyses of three biomass-related processes for electricity generation: the biomass gasification integrated externally fired combined cycle, the biomass gasification integrated dual-fuel combined cycle, and the biomass...