Finding ways to develop a sustainable bioeconomy: The case of industrial cassava in Colombia : Environmental impact and food security insights from a combined life cycle assessment and interview study

Sammanfattning: Cassava has been identified as a potential key crop for a sustainable bioeconomy in Colombia.However, the bioeconomy is not inherently sustainable, and neither is producing cassava,which makes research on it crucial. Increasing biomass circularity could be key for increasingthe cassava industry’s sustainability performance. Additionally, for industrial cassavaproduction to be sustainable, it cannot play against food security. This thesis aims toenvironmentally assess the impacts of using cassava harvesting residues (foliage) for animalfeed versus biogas production, and in addition, it seeks to understand what food securityimplications farmers in the Colombian Caribbean may experience from industrial cassavaproduction. A consequential LCA was performed to quantify the impacts on climate change,land use, and biodiversity from the two foliage-using options, while six qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted for the second objective. The results showed that using cassava foliage as animal protein feed could decrease thepressure on climate change, land use and biodiversity with -0.0000316, -0.00017, and-0.000181 species.yr respectively, while cassava foliage-based biogas increased all impactsassessed. The sensitivity analysis reinforced the results from the animal feed scenario andshowed that transport parameters had great influence on the biogas scenario. Furthermore, itwas found that industrial cassava production may have both negative and positiveconsequences for farmers food security. It may support it by for instance generate moreincome and result in more efficient calorie-production by replacing cattle-ranching. However,industrial cassava could increase land costs, and furthermore, reduce food availability whenused for non-foods such as bioplastics and/or replacing subsistence cropping. Hence,stakeholders within the cassava industry, are encouraged to incorporate these food securityrisks and opportunities in strategies and actions that pushes for industrial cassava’s role in theColombian bioeconomy. Lastly, actors are highly recommended to promote and use cassavafoliage for animal feed, while investigating the possibility of producing cassava residue-basedbiogas where long, heavy and/or highly contaminating transports can be avoided.