Quantifying the "Energy-Return-on-Investment" of desert greening in the Sahara/Sahel using a Global Climate Model

S. P. K. Bowring, L. M. Miller, L. Ganzeveld, A. Kleidon
2013 Earth System Dynamics Discussions  
Greening" the world's deserts has been proposed as a way to produce additional food, sequester carbon, and alter the climate of desert regions. Here, we quantify the potential benefits in terms of energetic quantities and compare these to the energetic costs. We then compare these using the metric of Energy-Return-On-Investment (EROI). We 5 15 region is irrigated equally, the western coastal region from June to August had the highest EROI. Other factors would complicate such a large-scale
more » ... cation of the Earth System, but this sensitivity study concludes that with a required energy input, desert greening may be energetically sustainable. Furthermore, we suggest that this type of EROI-analysis could be applied as a metric to assess a diverse range of human 20 alterations to, and interventions within, the Earth System. tems. Many environmental problems involve energy, either explicitly (as in the combus-718 ESDD 4, 2013 compare widely varying techno-economic processes in their interaction with the environment (e.g. Bakshi et al., 2011) . Variations in the definition of the E in and E out in Eq. (1) include energy (Murphy and Hall, 2010) , exergy (Gutowski et al., 2009 ) and emergy (Odum, 1996) . EROI or slight variations in it have been predominantly used as tools for life-cycle analysis in process engineering, industrial ecology, and ecological 5 25 a dynamic rather than static reflection of these considerations. Still, both of the previous EROI examples are calculated globally and do not incorporate the spatial or temporal differences that are specific to each study region. For both the "oil and gas" and the "wind turbine" examples, the EROI may not be spatially or 720 ESDD 4, 2013 Abstract ESDD 4, 2013
doi:10.5194/esdd-4-717-2013 fatcat:skkhtaw65newxcvp7vsxxmq3lq