Accounting for Human Health and Ecosystems Quality in Developing Sustainable Energy Products: The Implications of Wood Biomass-based Electricity Strategies to Climate Change Mitigation
Abstract
The prospect for transitions and transformations in the energy sector to mitigate climate
change raises concerns that actions should not shift the impacts from one impact category
to another, or from one sustainability domain to another. Although the development of
renewables mostly results in low environmental impacts, energy strategies are complex
and may result in the shifting of impacts. Strategies to climate change mitigation could
have potentially large effects on human health and ecosystems. Exposure to air pollution
claimed the lives of about seven million people worldwide in 2010, largely from the
combustion of solid fuels. The degradation of ecosystem services is a significant barrier
to achieving millennium development goals.
This thesis quantifies the biomass resources potential for Alberta; presents a user-friendly
and sector-specific framework for sustainability assessment; unlocks the information and
policy barriers to biomass integration in energy strategy; introduces new perspectives to
improve understanding of the life cycle human health and ecotoxicological effects of
energy strategies; provides insight regarding the guiding measures that are required to
ensure sustainable bioenergy production; validates the utility of the Environmental Life
Cycle Cost framework for economic sustainability assessment; and provides policyrelevant
societal cost estimates to demonstrate the importance of accounting for human
health and ecosystem externalities in energy planning.
Alberta is endowed with a wealth of forest and agricultural biomass resources, estimated
at 458 PJ of energy. Biomass has the potential to avoid 11-15% of GHG emissions and
substitute 14-17% of final energy demand by 2030. The drivers for integrating bioenergy
sources into Alberta’s energy strategy are economic diversification, technological
innovation, and resource conservation policy objectives. Bioenergy pathways significantly
improved both human health and ecosystem quality from coal fuel. Bioenergy
alternatives have higher economic cost than the prevailing scenario of coal-fired
generation system. Although coal fuel is the most cost effective way of electricity
generation, its combustion results in the loss of 123.5 billion USD per year for Alberta due to societal life cycle cost. This research demonstrated that bioenergy can support the
transformation of a fossil-based energy system to a more sustainable power production
system; however, respiratory effects is a concern.
Description
Keywords
Environmental Sciences
Citation
Weldu, Y. W. (2017). Accounting for Human Health and Ecosystems Quality in Developing Sustainable Energy Products: The Implications of Wood Biomass-based Electricity Strategies to Climate Change Mitigation (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/24649