Prioritizing objectives to evaluate the environmental, economic and social impacts of biofuel in Spain

Francisca Fernadez-Tirado and Carlos Parra-López

No 44117, 2008 International Congress, August 26-29, 2008, Ghent, Belgium from European Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: A variety of opinions either in favour or against development of biofuels has risen in the last years related to the environmental, economic and social impacts that its diffusion could entail compared to petroleum. Although the EU, in general, and Spain, in particular, are strongly supporting the development of biofuels they highlight that energy planning must be based on a sound analysis of the impacts of the diverse alternatives. This poster is a preliminary approach to this analysis. The main aim is to prioritize a set of environmental, economic and social objectives to identify the most relevant issues that would allow evaluating the impacts of the biofuel production and consumption in Spain. Analytic Network Process (ANP) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) are the multicriteria decision-making methodologies implemented to deal with the problem based on experts’ knowledge. The superiority of ANP versus AHP is discussed and the former is recommended. Results indicate that the most important objectives for a sustainable development of biofuels in Spain are conservation of non-renewable resources, within the environmental issues, the ease to be technically implemented in production, storage, distribution, and consumption, within the economic issues, and the direct employment in the agro-energy system, within the social issues.

Keywords: Resource/Energy; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 5
Date: 2008
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:eaae08:44117

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.44117

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