The forest environmental frontier in Russia: Between sustainable forest management discourses and 'wood mining' practice

Forest environmental frontiers around the globe: Old patterns and new trends in forest governance

Forests are subject to a huge variety of often competing socio-economic demands and environmental change. This paper assesses the related conflicts that occur along what we label to be a "Global Forest Environmental Frontier". Assessing 11 contributions to a special issue on the same topic, it summarizes the main contents of these papers and concludes with an assessment of major trends. The contributions to the special issue take both a regional and topic-related approach, assessing forest environmental conflicts on all five forested continents and investigating issues such as forest biodiversity conservation, climate change adaptation and mitigation, environmental justice and equity, development, and forest management and conservation discourses. Taken together, they provide an overview on the multiple facets of the Global Forest Environmental Frontier, but also identify some shared patterns and trajectories, which are outlined at the end of this paper.

Replacing Fossil Carbon in the Production of Ferroalloys with a Focus on Bio-Based Carbon: A Review

The production of ferroalloys and alloys like ferronickel, ferrochromium, ferromanganese, silicomanganese, ferrosilicon and silicon is commonly carried out in submerged arc furnaces. Submerged arc furnaces are also used to upgrade ilmenite by producing pig iron and a titania-rich slag. Metal containing resources are smelted in this furnace type using fossil carbon as a reducing agent, which is responsible for a large amount of direct CO2 emissions in those processes. Instead, renewable bio-based carbon could be a viable direct replacement of fossil carbon currently investigated by research institutions and companies to lower the CO2 footprint of produced alloys. A second option could be the usage of hydrogen. However, hydrogen has the disadvantages that current production facilities relying on solid reducing agents need to be adjusted. Furthermore, hydrogen reduction of ignoble metals like chromium, manganese and silicon is only possible at very low H2O/H2 partial pressure ratios. The present article is a comprehensive review of the research carried out regarding the utilization of bio-based carbon for the processing of the mentioned products. Starting with the potential impact of the ferroalloy industry on greenhouse gas emissions, followed by a general description of bio-based reducing agents and unit operations covered by this review, each following chapter presents current research carried out to produce each metal. Most studies focused on pre-reduction or solid-state reduction except the silicon industry, which instead had a strong focus on smelting up to an industrial-scale and the design of bio-based carbon for submerged arc furnace processes. Those results might be transferable to other submerged arc furnace processes as well and could help to accelerate research to produce other metals. Deviations between the amount of research and scale of tests for the same unit operation but different metal resources were identified and closer cooperation could be helpful to transfer knowledge from one area to another. Life cycle assessment to produce ferronickel and silicon already revealed the potential of bio-based reducing agents in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but was not carried out for other metals until now.