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Global patterns of socioeconomic biomass flows in the year 2000: A comprehensive assessment of supply, consumption and constraints

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In this article, a comprehensive assessment of global socioeconomic biomass harvest, use and trade for the year 2000 is presented, where the authors developed country-level livestock balances and a consistent set of factors to estimate flows of used biomass not covered by international statistics (eg grazed biomass, crop residues) and indirect flows (i.e., biomass destroyed during harvest but not used).
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This article is published in Ecological Economics.The article was published on 2008-04-15. It has received 351 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Biomass & Energy source.

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Sustainable biochar to mitigate global climate change

TL;DR: The maximum sustainable technical potential of biochar to mitigate climate change is estimated, which shows that it has a larger climate-change mitigation potential than combustion of the same sustainably procured biomass for bioenergy, except when fertile soils are amended while coal is the fuel being offset.
Journal ArticleDOI

The material footprint of nations.

TL;DR: The most comprehensive and most highly resolved economic input–output framework of the world economy together with a detailed database of global material flows are used to calculate the full material requirements of all countries covering a period of two decades and demonstrate that countries’ use of nondomestic resources is about threefold larger than the physical quantity of traded goods.
Journal ArticleDOI

Growth in global materials use, GDP and population during the 20th century

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present an assessment of the global use of materials since the beginning of the 20th century based on the conceptual and methodological principles of material flow accounting (MFA).
Journal ArticleDOI

Life Cycle Assessment of Biochar Systems: Estimating the Energetic, Economic, and Climate Change Potential

TL;DR: Life cycle assessment was used to estimate the energy and climate change impacts and the economics of biochar systems, which may at present only deliver climate change mitigation benefits and be financially viable as a distributed system using waste biomass.
BookDOI

Global Energy Assessment: Toward a Sustainable Future

TL;DR: The Global Energy Assessment (GEA) as mentioned in this paper brings together over 300 international researchers to provide an independent, scientifically based, integrated and policy-relevant analysis of current and emerging energy issues and options.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Global patterns in biodiversity

TL;DR: This work states that the distribution of biodiversity across the Earth can be described in terms of a relatively small number of broad-scale spatial patterns, and theory is developing rapidly, improving in its internal consistency, and more readily subjected to empirical challenge.
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Evaluation of ecosystem dynamics, plant geography and terrestrial carbon cycling in the LPJ dynamic global vegetation model

TL;DR: The LPJ model as mentioned in this paper combines process-based, large-scale representations of terrestrial vegetation dynamics and land-atmosphere carbon and water exchanges in a modular framework, including feedback through canopy conductance between photosynthesis and transpiration and interactive coupling between these 'fast' processes and other ecosystem processes.
Journal ArticleDOI

The Human Footprint and the Last of the Wild

Abstract: I Genesis, God blesses human beings and bids us to take dominion over the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, and every other living thing. We are entreated to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth, and subdue it (Gen. 1:28). The bad news, and the good news, is that we have almost succeeded. There is little debate in scientific circles about the importance of human influence on ecosystems. According to scientists’ reports, we appropriate over 40% of the net primary productivity (the green material) produced on Earth each year (Vitousek et al. 1986, Rojstaczer et al. 2001). We consume 35% of the productivity of the oceanic shelf (Pauly and Christensen 1995), and we use 60% of freshwater run-off (Postel et al. 1996). The unprecedented escalation in both human population and consumption in the 20th century has resulted in environmental crises never before encountered in the history of humankind and the world (McNeill 2000). E. O. Wilson (2002) claims it would now take four Earths to meet the consumption demands of the current human population, if every human consumed at the level of the average US inhabitant. The influence of human beings on the planet has become so pervasive that it is hard to find adults in any country who have not seen the environment around them reduced in natural values during their lifetimes—woodlots converted to agriculture, agricultural lands converted to suburban development, suburban development converted to urban areas. The cumulative effect of these many local changes is the global phenomenon of human influence on nature, a new geological epoch some call the “anthropocene” (Steffen and Tyson 2001). Human influence is arguably the most important factor affecting life of all kinds in today’s world (Lande 1998, Terborgh 1999, Pimm 2001, UNEP 2001). Yet despite the broad consensus among biologists about the importance of human influence on nature, this phenomenon and its implications are not fully appreciated by the larger human community, which does not recognize them in its economic systems (Hall et al. 2001) or in most of its political decisions (Soulé and Terborgh 1999, Chapin et al. 2000). In part, this lack of appreciation may be due to scientists’ propensity to express themselves in terms like “appropriation of net primary productivity” or “exponential population growth,” abstractions that require some training to understand. It may be due to historical assumptions about and habits inherited from times when human beings, as a group, had dramatically less influence on the biosphere. Now the individual deci-
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