Project description
The future of ecological footprint calculations
It is important to accurately quantify and reduce ecological footprints. However, ecological footprint calculations are hindered by the scarcity of essential data on energy and material usage throughout a product’s life cycle. Additionally, existing methods tend to overlook the crucial role of biodiversity’s ecosystem service attributes, relying instead on a limited number of well-known species. In this context, the EU-funded SIZE project will introduce an innovative framework based on unifying scaling principles that incorporate product size and species body size. This approach will predict vital characteristics of biofuel production, including energy return on investment, land requirements, greenhouse gas emissions, and global impact indicators such as species extinction risks. The research will focus on liquid biofuel production from diverse feedstocks.
Objective
There is a major scientific and societal challenge in quantifying and reducing ecological footprints of products. Ecological footprint calculations suffer severely from a limited availability of data, such as the amount of energy and materials associated with the production, use and disposal of products. Furthermore, ecological footprints pertaining to biodiversity are typically biased towards a limited number of well-known species with a focus on relative species richness, leaving out ecosystem service attributes of biodiversity. As it is virtually impossible to collect all the empirical data required for all species, there is an urgent need to develop an operational framework to derive representative ecological footprints with limited data requirements. I propose to develop a novel framework based on a set of unifying scaling principles related to the production size of products and the body size of species. These scaling principles will be developed to predict key characteristics of biofuel production, such as energy return of investment, agricultural land requirements and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as global impact indicators, such as species extinction risks. The focus of the research is on (1) liquid biofuel production (bioethanol and biodiesel) from various first and second generation feedstock as an important but controversial renewable energy source (2) vascular plant diversity, as the common basis of all terrestrial ecosystems, and (3) habitat destruction and climate change, as important drivers of global change. Together with the PI, two PhD students, two Postdocs and a technical assistant will work on different components of the new predictive models, substantially enhancing the scientific understanding of how to provide reliable ecological footprints in practice.
Fields of science
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringcarbon capture engineering
- engineering and technologyindustrial biotechnologybiomaterialsbiofuels
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesforestry
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantHost institution
6525 XZ Nijmegen
Netherlands