The smoke from one Nairobi school’s firewood use was so bad that two cooks quit. A new clean energy source burns cleaner without destroying forests.
biofuels
Firewood is cutting into Kenya's forests. Entrepreneurs are responding with a new "biomass briquette" industry that turns wastes into fuel.
Ending Tropical Deforestation: The Global Debate About Biofuels and Land-Use Change
The biofuels industry has grown rapidly in the past decade, driven by government blending requirements and clean fuels standards in major economies. There is potential for significant new demand for biofuels from the aviation sector, which is looking for ways to meet its goal of carbon neutral...
WRI responds to a critique of its working paper, Avoiding Bioenergy Competition for Food Crops and Land. The paper articulates reasons the world should avoid dedicating land to bioenergy production if it is to sustainably feed the global population in 2050.
Biofuels and bioenergy take up finite land resources at the cost of food production and carbon storage and doesn’t guarantee carbon emissions cuts.
Avoiding Bioenergy Competition for Food Crops and Land
Creating a Sustainable Food Future, Installment Nine
Installment 9 of Creating a Sustainable Food Future shows that any dedicated use of land for growing bioenergy inherently comes at the cost of not using that land for growing food or animal feed, or for storing carbon.
It recommends several policy changes to...
Update [10/17/2011]: WRI has released the latest edition of Climate Science.
The Time Value of Carbon and Carbon Storage
Clarifying the terms and the policy implications of the debate
This working paper explores the value of temporary carbon storage, as well as the implications of those temporary storage values for several critical policy design questions relating to greenhouse gas accounting and biological offsets.
Fields of Fuel
Market and Environmental Implications of Switching to Grass for U.S. Transport
This study examines the impacts of increased commercial switchgrass production on U.S. agricultural land-use patterns, commodity prices, and the environmental impacts of cropping systems in the agricultural sector.
