Browsing by Person "Marting Vidaurre, Nirvana Angela"

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Assessing social aspects of biobased value chains
(2024) Marting Vidaurre, Nirvana Angela; Lewandowski, Iris
Achieving human well-being for all humanity, reducing inequality, and eradicating poverty while preserving the environment are the aims of sustainable development. The bioeconomy offers alternative ways of utilising biomass and other biogenic resources with the objective of addressing global challenges relevant for sustainable development such as resource scarcity, climate change and food security. Lignocellulosic perennial crops like miscanthus, have been investigated as a sustainable source for energy and materials. While various studies assessing the environmental performance of lignocellulosic crops have been published, the analysis of the social dimension of such systems has been little explored. Existing frameworks to perform social assessments are general in their coverage of social aspects and provide long lists of social impact categories, for which adaptation and prioritization is needed according to the specific case being analysed. Furthermore, existing methodologies for social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) leave the practitioner to choose between pursuing a context-specific analysis or a general (country or sector specific) analysis considering the value chain. To date there is no methodology to perform a S-LCA in an integrated manner for both the foreground and background systems of a biobased value chain, which takes into account the different requirements for analysing these systems. The foreground system is composed by the core processes being analysed, while the background system is constituted by the processes needed to supply inputs required for the foreground system. This doctoral thesis aims to develop an integrated methodology to assess the foreground and the background systems of biobased value chains, which combines techniques for performing a context-specific assessment of the foreground system and a generic assessment of the background system. The overall question that this study aims to answer is how to proceed in assessing the social aspects of a biobased value chain covering both the foreground and the background systems of a production process considering the study is an ex-ante analysis? The specific objectives to answer this question are i) to identify which social aspects are relevant for the assessment of biobased value chains, ii) to identify which aspects are to be considered when assessing the potential social impacts of agricultural production processes on the stakeholder “farmer” and iii) to develop a social risk assessment approach that is regionalized in order to assess the potential social impacts within biobased value chains. To achieve the first objective a literature review of empirical studies covering social impacts of agricultural and forestry value chains was performed. This helped in the identification of social aspects that are often assessed and reported. Then the Methodological Sheets for Subcategories in S-LCA were used as a reference to allocate the social aspects reported and evaluated by empirical literature and review studies to those impact subcategories proposed by the sheets. This enabled the identification of social aspects often assessed and those potentially overlooked in the sheets. To achieve the second objective a survey among farmers in a region of Croatia was conducted. Additionally, the study aimed to assess the feasibility of cultivating miscanthus in the region, taking into account potential challenges and opportunities, as well as farmers' willingness to adopt the crop miscanthus. The third objective of performing a regionalized social risk assessment of a biobased value chain was achieved by following the SOCA approach in combination with EXIOBASE 3 as a source of regional information on the origin of inputs and for the estimation of worker hours. This analysis used a case study based on the production of advanced biofuels in Croatia to assess the shortcomings of the methodology. The results showed that the Methodological Sheets for Subcategories in S-LCA provide good coverage of social topics relevant for biobased value chains, but that the stakeholders “smallholder” and “family farm” are not adequately addressed. Drawing on the empirical literature reviewed, the study emphasizes the relevance of these stakeholders in the analysis of biobased value chains, and proposes criteria for consideration in the assessment of these stakeholders. Furthermore, the interviews with farmers revealed that the aspects most valued by them were health and safety, access to water, land consolidation and rights, income and local employment, and food security. Responses to the question of whether they would adopt the crop miscanthus highlight the importance of an established market, good trading conditions and profitability of cultivation. The farmers regarded the provision of subsidies as one of the main factors that make a crop attractive. Opportunities for the adoption of the miscanthus cultivation are related to high yields and low input requirements. Barriers include land conflicts and land availability. Results also showed that mainly harvesting operations were identified as hotspots in the local agricultural operations due to the amount of worker hours required for these processes in comparison to the rest of the agricultural operations. The main contribution of this study is the development of an integrated approach that provides guidance for assessing comprehensively the foreground and background systems of biobased value chains. This consists of a local perspective and a value chain perspective of not yet established value chains. The methodology and framework developed serve for the early identification of potential social impacts in biobased value chains, specifically agricultural value chains. In the current literature, this methodology could be part of what is called materiality assessment. The theoretical framework developed serves for the analysis of the stakeholders “smallholder” and “family farm” and recommends the subsequent involvement of this stakeholder in the selection of context-relevant impact categories. The participation of these stakeholders is important to acquire local knowledge and to select impact categories that reflect their interests, merging a top-down with a bottom-up approach. The social risk assessment to analyse the background system should be applied when the value chain suppliers are not known and when a rapid assessment of the social risk of the value chain is required. The ultimate goal of S-LCA is to provide quality information about potential social impacts in production systems to decision makers, which will take action to reduce inequalities in the different regions of the world and thus contributing to achieve a more sustainable economy.