Energy Biosciences Institute to focus on socio-economic impacts of bioenergy

The global transition towards biofuels and bioenergy is much more than a mere agricultural revolution. It is a complex process of change with impacts on a large number of socio-economic factors. In this respect, we have stressed many times that biofuels and bioenergy projects can go different ways: if implemented in a bad way, they can perpetuate existing economic patterns that lead towards more inequality, environmental degradation and poverty (earlier post). But if done well, they offer a unique opportunity to boost the livelihoods of some of the world's poorest people (e.g. 70% of sub-Saharan Africans are dependent on agriculture) and create a whole new development paradigm in the South, centered around energy security, access to mobility, energy independence, environmental sustainability, strengthened income and food security and more equitable socio-economic relations.

The University of Berkeley's Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), like the Biopact, understands that bioenergy is fully embedded not only in the socio-economic fabric of the communities and nations where it is produced, but in a globalised market. The future of biofuels therefor depends on a deep understanding of their impacts on this fabric, and on our capacity to monitor and project these changes.

The EBI has identified five broad areas of inquiry into socio-economic drivers of the bioenergy future:

Global Socio-economic Impacts
The development of world trade in biofuels is expected to impact nations in many different ways. The EBI would interested in understanding the possible effects of various scenarios on socio-economic questions of food availability, social equity, and trade from a global perspective.

Next-Generation Assessment
The introduction of a large-scale biofuels industry will have a significant impact on energy, agricultural and food systems, and the environment. To understand these challenges, a new framework for assessing the social and environmental implications of biofuels is needed, one that uses the best available tools and methods from life-cycle assessment (LCA), fuel-cycle analysis, computer-based systems analysis, cost estimation, multicriteria decision-making, sustainability science, and environmental-impact assessment.

Biofuels Evaluation and Adoption
If biofuels are to make a substantial contribution to the world’s energy needs, new crops, new cropping practices, and new fuel production technologies will have to be adopted by a wide range of economic actors. … Projects in this area would seek to understand the energy, agricultural, and environmental impacts of current and potential biofuels, including potential costs and environmental implications of different production pathways and barriers that could prevent deployment of each pathway.

Biofuels Markets and Networks
The productivity, cost effectiveness, land use, environmental impacts, and transportation requirements of bio-energy crops needs to be integrated and modeled in a regional context, linking local, national, and global dimensions of supply and demand. This would include analysis of the allocation of land and other resources among competing alternatives to meet various levels of demand for biofuels.

Social Interactions and Risks
Development of a large-scale international biofuels industry will create changes at many levels in producer nations and may, therefore, create social concerns about biofuels. … Insights into the design of processes and policies concerning the public understanding of biofuel technologies and the modeling of social adoption in different political contexts on a global scale will be valuable

With these research areas, the EBI follows in the footsteps of those who see both the risks and the major opportunities brought by biofuels, especially for the developing countries:
bioenergy :: biofuels :: energy :: sustainability :: ethanol :: biodiesel :: biomass :: climate change ::food security :: energy security :: agriculture :: rural development :: social impacts :: developing world ::

Dan Kammen, professor of energy and resources and of public policy, and director of Berkeley's Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, says "biofuels, unlike solar energy or gas-powered plants, affect land use directly, which means they affect the lives of the rich and poor directly. They affect fundamental things like the status of women, public health, and even how many calories kids in Kenya will eat. If we orient and oversee this biofuel initiative right, we can benefit all of those things."

Kammen, a member of the EBI executive committee, said that in many parts of the world, plants raised for biofuels are grown as subsistence crops, which are mainly farmed by women. "Biofuel technology can become either a problem or an opportunity for these women," he says.

How can we grow biofuel crops that do not supplant food crops? Kammen notes that the perennial grass miscanthus, for example, is a popular biofuel choice because of its rapid growth and high yield, but it can only be used for biofuel. Other crops, such as sweet sorghum, may be more appropriate biofuel sources in economically poor regions where fertile land is scarce; it is both a food and an energy crop, and needs little water and fertilizer (see our discussion about the ICRISAT's 'Pro-poor biofuels initiative' based on sweet sorghum).

Recognizing that the success of biofuel technology involves more than developing a plant stock that can yield more biofuel, such as ethanol, the EBI proposal specifically includes a socio-economic research component to address such issues.

Implicit in EBI's research agenda is the understanding that neglecting the socio-economic considerations of a biofuel economy likely will lead to a technology that primarily benefits affluent farmers, while leaving low-income, subsistence farmers behind.

"What's happening now is that land is being taken out of production for food as different countries move to biofuel," said David Zilberman, professor and chair of agricultural and resource economics and co-director of Berkeley's Center for Sustainable Resource Development.

"Sixteen percent of the corn acreage in the United States is going to ethanol, and it will rise to 35 percent in the near future as processing capacity expands," says Zilberman.

What's exciting about EBI, adds Zilberman, is that researchers can look into ways to resolve this food-fuel tradeoff. "We have to find ways to move to plants that are more efficient, to answer the call of biofuel without necessitating this land grab," he said.


Many similar think tanks and research institutes have taken initiatives to study the socio-economic impacts and key-drivers of the emerging bioenergy paradigm. To mind come the International Energy Agency's Bioenergy Task 29, which studies the 'Socio-Economic Drivers in Implementing Bioenergy Projects', the United Nations Foundation's Biofuels Initiative or the Food and Agriculture Organisation's International Bioenergy Platform.

Some civil society organisations have very swiftly taken an unnuanced stance against bioenergy in general, and thereby made themselves part of the research on how to overcome problems relating to the social acceptance of biofuels, with all their complexity. It would be a grave mistake for these organisations to limit their views and actions to an ideologically narrowminded agenda that may end up by destroying one of the developing world's biggest chances to open a new era of prosperity. Biofuels in themselves are value-free; it is the way they are produced, used and traded, that needs scrutinity. And the analysis of potential socio-economic benefits and risks therefor requires an unprejudiced, openminded and scientific attitude.

More information:
University of Berkeley: Shifting to a biofueled world - Research aims for wide social and economic benefits - April 12, 2007.
IEA Bioenergy Task 40 website.