Sustainability of the Swedish Sugar Sector : Assessment Tool Development and Case Study Appraisal

ISBN-13: 9783639141320 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 124 str.

Barry Ness

Opis

The book contributes to the development of tools and methods for assessing sustainability and applies them to an assessment of the Swedish sugar production system. The aims are to compile an overview of assessment approaches, to suggest a method(s) for structuring and analyzing sustainability issues and to appraise sustainability impacts from Swedish sugar production. The analyses uncovered a number of regional to global sustainability challenges stemming from the production system. An analysis using an assessment model calculated the impacts for social and ecological indicators for Sweden. A GIS-based proximity analysis tool was used to calculate beet transport distances and then estimated diesel fuel consumption and air emissions for five pollutants during the movement of beets from field to processing facility. The assessment tool survey and categorization showed that many available approaches for assessing sustainability are incomplete when more holistic interpretations of sustainability are considered. A new approach to structure complex issues of unsustainability is also presented.

O autorze

The author holds a Ph.D. in Sustainability Science from Lund
University, Sweden. His research focuses broadly on interactions
between human and nature systems with specific a emphasis on
sustainability assessments of food and bioenergy production
systems. Research also centers on methods to conceptualize
complex sustainability challenges.