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Climate change, food security, and energy efficiency have become universal challenges for global economic development and environmental conservation that demand in-depth multidisciplinary research. Biofuels have emerged as a decisive factor in the fight against global warming and air pollution from fossil fuel use, and they can play an important role in the development of poor as well as rich regions. In this work, we investigate the implications of biofuels for regional development in Brazil given its historic experience as an ethanol producer. We compare the environmental and economic impacts of the two predominant ethanol production techniques, in order to understand their effects on output, employment and income and also their potential to reduce the intensity of fossil fuel use and emissions of greenhouse gases. As we focus on a developing country, we also examine the distributional impacts of ethanol technology deployment, in terms of its potential contributions to poverty alleviation and the reduction of regional income inequalities. The production technologies currently used to produce ethanol differ spatially in Brazil, with a capital-intensive technology being used in the Southern regions of the country, and a traditional labor-intensive technology in the Northern regions. We take advantage of this regional variation to conduct a comparative regional analysis of ethanol production technology choice. We evaluate and compare the direct and indirect relationship between output, employment, income, energy intensity, and pollution emissions at the subnational level for the two ethanol production technologies, showing quantitatively the interrelations between the ethyl alcohol industry and the rest of the economy. We hypothesize that the adoption of capital-intensive ethanol production technology provides greater output and employment and lower environmental and energy costs than more traditional technologies and, in contrast, that the implementation of the traditional technology alleviates income inequality by increasing the income received by households in economically deprived regions.

A consortium of three universities, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), and Technische Universität Berlin, and the Municipality of São Paulo, Brazil, propose a study of urban freight movement and development of plans to improve these flows. Our goal is to identify physical and regulatory means of improving freight-movement efficiency, with direct the consequence of reducing distribution costs. Indirectly, this should reduce congestion for all users, thereby improving reliability of all transportation movements in the region, not just those of urban freight. Urban congestion and the competition for public resources has been a near-permanent feature of local economies. Public roads, ports, terminals, and marketplace activities can generate tremendous economies of scale and scope. These economies serve to encourage both businesses and people to co-locate to obtain the benefits. However, congestion, accidents, and environmental degradation, the by-products of development, often reduce the benefits, curtailing development opportunities, and, if unmanaged, reversing economic and social progress. It appears to be the case that this has happened in the São Paulo region. In our view, this can be changed through planning and management of urban infrastructure and through regulation of its use. Our goal is to reduce the debilitating level of congestion and restore some of the economic (and social) benefits derived from fair and efficient transportation of goods and people.

Energy is an important input in growing, processing, packaging, distributing, storing, preparing, serving, and disposing of food. Analysis using the two most recent U.S. benchmark input-output accounts and a national energy data system shows that in the United States, use of energy along the food chain for food purchases by or for U.S. households increased between 1997 and 2002 at more than six times the rate of increase in total domestic energy use. This increase in food-related energy flows is over 80 percent of energy flow increases nationwide over the period. The use of more energy-intensive technologies throughout the U.S. food system accounted for half of this increase, with the remainder attributed to population growth and higher real (inflation-adjusted) per capita food expenditures. A projection of food-related energy use based on 2007 total U.S. energy consumption and food expenditure data and the benchmark 2002 input-output accounts suggests that food-related energy use as a share of the national energy budget grew from 14.4 percent in 2002 to an estimated 15.7 percent in 2007.