• You are here: EPA Home
• ReVA
• Tools
• EDTs Under Development
• Future Midwest Landscape-EDT

Future Midwest Landscapes-EDT

Introduction

The Future Midwestern Landscapes Environmental Decision Tool Kit (FML-EDT) is a study of biofuels and ecosystem services in the Midwestern U.S. with a key outcome to develop a tool to help ensure that biofuels-policy and land-use decisions are made in ways that recognize implications for ecosystem services, and thereby more broadly protect human well-being in the Midwest.

As part of EPA’s core mission “To protect human health and the environment”, the FML-EDT is part of one of several EPA place-based projects which aim to create research results relevant to the stakeholders, issues, and landscapes in an explicit geographic area.

EPA is identifying ecosystem services as the outputs of ecosystem processes that contribute to human well-being. EPA is focusing this research on informing trade-offs among ecosystem services that would provided under alternative management and policy decisions.

Objectives

In his 2007 State of the Union address, President Bush established aggressive national goals for development of biofuels. The “20-in-10” goal calls for reducing gasoline usage by 20% in the next 10 years. This reduction is to be achieved by “increasing the supply of renewable and alternative fuels by setting a mandatory fuels standard to require 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels in 2017 ” (Twenty In Ten: Strengthening America's Energy Security).

Federal, state and local policies are already encouraging biofuels production and the results are changing land uses in the US, especially the Midwest which is a center for agricultural activity. Current incentives for biofuels include:

• IRS (tax incentives)
• USDA and DOE (grant and loan programs)
• Customs (fuel ethanol import duties)
• EPA (renewable fuel content standards)
• State and local incentives

A key objective of the FML-EDT is to develop tools to evaluate alternate pathways of how our country may achieve the "20-in-10" goal. The long term goal of the FML-EDT is to use alternative future landscape scenarios and ecosystem services for the Midwestern US to help achieve the "20-in-10" goal in a sustainable manner. These scenarios would articulate a spatially explicit model of best practices for the environmentally sustainable development of renewable energy resources.

ReVA's FML-EDT goal emphasizes and supports the current goal of the Office of Research and Development's to focus on conducting spatially explicit analyses of potential changes in land uses associated with feedstock production, and the resulting changes in ecosystem services.

Specific objectives necessary to achieve ReVA's FML-EDT overall goal include:

1. Develop and analyze alternative future scenarios
2. Engage Stakeholders
3. Collaborate across organizations
   • Stakeholder involvement in scenario definition
   • Collaborator involvement in scenario definition

Data & Methods

Several alternative future landscapes will be presented that reflect different assumptions about how biofuels will be developed and how lands and watercourses will be managed. Some of these will be at the scale of the entire study region, others at subregional or watershed scales.

Future Scenarios

We are currently considering two distinct types of future scenarios, differing in how land-use change is driven.

Type “A” (policy-driven)

 

Local Navigation

• EPA Home
• Privacy and Security Notice
• Contact Us