Abstract
Indicators are crucial for measuring progress in sustainability, community development, and energy equity objectives. Thus, indicators are vital for siting or repurposing energy facilities, revealing benefits and adverse effects on underserved communities compared to those under baseline or alternative conditions. However, the use of quantitative metrics can reduce the assessment of progress to a technical exercise of data collection, frequently lacking citizen participation. In this paper, we emphasize the importance of incorporating procedural and distributional justice into the siting process, through the identification of indicators aimed at avoiding the perpetuation of or increase in socioeconomic disparities. More specifically, we describe the process through which a diverse committee of US agriculture, energy, and environmental justice stakeholders and experts, along with US energy researchers, collaboratively developed a list of indicators reflecting justice objectives for siting bioenergy. Stakeholders emphasized categories of procedural justice indicators such as trust, influence, informed consent, and private property rights, whereas energy burden, for example, was identified as an important distributional justice indicator. The proposed indicators can be selected or modified to reflect local needs and priorities. This paper demonstrates that indicators can be developed through participatory processes to guide stakeholders to make informed decisions regarding siting and permitting of biorefineries or biopower facilities. These indicators enable the comparison of siting options; early identification of key problems, concerns, or priorities; and tracking of progress toward justice-related targets. Ultimately, this approach contributes to a more equitable and sustainable energy transition.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 104166 |
| Journal | Energy Research and Social Science |
| Volume | 127 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Sep 2025 |
Funding
This paper is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO). The project supporting this work, “Energy Equity in the Transition to Renewables: The Bioenergy Case” was funded from October 1, 2021 through September 30, 2023. We thank our sponsors and coauthors Andrea Bailey and Brianna Farber for project guidance. Advisory committee members included Bill Belden, Sr. Agriculture Specialist, ANTARES Group; William Bryan, Director of Research, Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance; Dave Effross, Principal Policy Advisor for Energy and Climate of the Labor Energy Partnership, AFL-CIO (now State Energy and Climate Policy Manager for Montgomery County, Maryland); Berneece Herbert, Department Chair, Urban and Regional Planning, Jackson State University; Renee Hoyos, Director of Environmental Justice Office, Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (now Principal Consultant for Environmental Justice, ERM); Cassandra Johnson Gaither, Research Social Scientist, USDA Forest Service; Ariel Kagan, Director of Agriculture Strategy at Environmental Initiative (now Climate and Working Lands Program Director at Minnesota Farmers Union); Stacie Peterson, Energy Program Director, National Center for Appropriate Technology (now Executive Director of the American Solar Grazing Association); Tequila Smith, VP of Sustainability, Georgia Power Company (now Chief Sustainability Officer at Covanta); and Floyd Vergara, Director of State Governmental Affairs, Clean Fuels Alliance America. Thank you to Christopher DeRolph for reviewing an earlier version of this manuscript. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan ( http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan ). The findings and conclusions in this publication are those of the authors and should not be construed to represent any official U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Department of Energy, or U.S. Government determination or policy, nor do they necessarily represent views of any of the institutions for whom the authors or stakeholder advisory committee members are employed or were employed at the time of the committee meetings.
Keywords
- Bioenergy
- Biorefinery
- Energy justice
- Environmental justice
- Equity
- Stakeholder engagement