Jan 05: Researches and new findings kept us informing about the various researches in the field of Science and Technology.
An article in January edition of Science throws light on negative environmental impact of using biofuel made from corn, sugar cane and soy.
The study suggests that though using fossil fuels like coal and oil are contributing more to the incidents of global warming but using biofuel will be a costlier affair in terms of biodiversity loss and destruction of farmland.
Need of alternatives due to increasing impact of fossil fuels in global warming has kicked of competition among various scientific community to search and develop different biofuels as viable option and many countries are investing to get this biofuels to secure their future needs.
But the new research finding has stirred the controversy after lots of investment in this field and the market is expected to swell worth billions of dollars a year.
Jorn Scharlemann and William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama write in Science under How Green is Biofuels , “Regarless of how effective sugar cane is for producing ethanol its benefits quickly diminish if carbon rich tropical forests are being razed to make fields, thereby causing vast greenhouse gas emission increases.�
They added that such comparison become more lopsided when the full environmental benefits of biodiversity conservation, hydrological functioning and soil protection are included.
In their research they have emphasized a method developed in 2007 by Zah et al. of the Empa Research Institute in Switzerland which took total environmental impacts into account.
In the study Greenhouse emissions were plotted against overall environment impacts of 29 fuels out of which showed US corn ethanol and cane ethanol having greater total environmental impacts than fossils fuels.
Also the results showed that biofuels produced from waste products like recycled cooking oil and wood ethanol were more efficient than other biofuel.
William Laurance says “Different biofuels vary enormously in how eco-friendly they are,�
And thus it holds importance when he says,� We need to be smart and promote the right biofuels, or we won't be helping the environment much at all.�
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