Abstract
Environmental sustainability has recently shifted towards biodiversity protection via governmental and intergovernmental initiatives (e.g., the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, MA). The life cycle assessment, the widespread method for assessing environmental sustainability, was not created to evaluate impacts on biodiversity. However, several authors recognize its ability to estimate biodiversity loss drivers (impact indices on land use change and ecosystem). The study aims to apply LCA to the forest sector, precisely to the wood–energy chain of Hophornbeam, to cover suggestions of the MA for the biodiversity impact assessment. Six different scenarios for stove (3) and fireplace (3) wood production were analyzed, evaluating two baselines and four alternative scenarios, including sensitivity analyses related to transport distances for the raw materials. The functional unit is 1 MJ of energy. The fireplace combustion scenarios are relatively more sustainable than the stove ones are (2.95–3.21% less). The global warming potential (around 3 g CO2 eq/MJ) is consistent with current European directives on the sustainability of biofuels and scientific literature. The scenarios showed similarities regarding the impact of the categories related to MA drivers. Although biodiversity is protected by limiting forest management, some authors argue that for some species (e.g., Hophornbeam), a rational tree felling could produce biofuels, increasing biodiversity.
Highlights
The term sustainability is still highly controversial, and it is believed that this concept has been defined independently, it is closely linked to ideas of an economic nature
This paper aims to assess the impact of hophornbeam wood production for energy purposes using the life cycle assessment (LCA) and includes specific indices to cover Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) suggestions for biodiversity assessment
The greater impact of the woodstove scenarios is entirely attributable to the increased use of fuels, lubricants, and machines for the wood splitting and cutting phases, which require more inputs as the material is reduced into smaller pieces
Summary
The term sustainability is still highly controversial, and it is believed that this concept has been defined independently, it is closely linked to ideas of an economic nature. The attention paid to the definition of sustainable development and sustainability has materially shifted the choices of human activities towards radically different approaches. Consider the application of the Hartwick–Solow criterion [1,2,3], which justified the exploitation of natural capital based on the criterion of substitutability with economic and artificial capitals. The Hartwick–Solow criterion can be described through the concept of weak sustainability. Weak sustainability has been partially overcome by strong sustainability, which presupposes the nonsubstitutability of natural capital. Strong sustainability supports the need to guarantee natural resources stocks
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