Sustainability Analysis of Biomass Biofuel Production from Marginal and Degraded Lands of India

Abstract

newline Rapidly increasing global population and unsustainable exploitation of natural resources has already degraded the 30% of the global land area. This resulted in the depletion of various ecosystem services and affecting over 3 billion peoples globally. The United Nations (UN) has recently announced the decade 2021-2030 as the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration focusing on the ecosystem-based land restoration. The recently concluded IPBES global assessment on land degradation acknowledged degradation as a major threat to the viability of the land system and thereby adversely affecting the ecosystems services offered by global land system for a good quality of life and human well-being. Therefore, restoration of marginal and degraded lands is imperative for attaining UN-Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs). To this, bioenergy plantations have been suggested as one of the potential solution to restore degraded lands and mitigate climate change, as these plantations reduce the soil erosion, enrich soil nutrients, improves biodiversity, sequester the atmospheric carbon and substitute fossil fuels. In this backdrop, this doctoral thesis is diversely focussed on (i) delineating the marginal and degraded lands of India for biomass and biofuel production; (ii) field validation of biomass and bioenergy plantations on selected marginal and degraded lands; (iii) emergy-based sustainability analysis of biomass and bioenergy production from these lands; (iv) preparation of an action plan and policy recommendations for sustainable management of these land resources for the multifaceted prospects of bioenergy production, deriving value-added products promoting carbon sequestration and regaining other ecosystem services.