[en] Availability of and access to useful energy is a crucial factor for maintaining and improving human well-being. Looming scarcities and increasing awareness of environmental, economic, and social impacts of conventional sources of non-renewable energy have focused attention on renewable energy sources, including biomass. The complex interactions of social, economic, and ecological factors among the bioenergy system components of feedstock supply, conversion technology, and energy allocation have been a major obstacle to the broader development of bioenergy systems. For widespread implementation of bioenergy to occur there is a need for an integrated approach to model the social, economic, and ecological interactions associated with bioenergy. Such models can serve as a planning and evaluation tool to help decide when, where, and how bioenergy systems can contribute to development. One approach to integrated modeling is by assessing the sustainability of a bioenergy system. The evolving nature of sustainability can be described by an adaptive systems approach using general systems principles. Discussing these principles reveals that participation of stakeholders in all components of a bioenergy system is a crucial factor for sustainability. Multi-criteria analysis (MCA) is an effective tool to implement this approach. This approach would enable decision-makers to evaluate bioenergy systems for sustainability in a participatory, transparent, timely, and informed manner

[en] Sustainable bioenergy systems are, by definition, embedded in social, economic, and environmental contexts and depend on support of many stakeholders with different perspectives. The resulting complexity constitutes a major barrier to the implementation of bioenergy projects. The goal of this paper is to evaluate the potential of Multi Criteria Analysis (MCA) to facilitate the design and implementation of sustainable bioenergy projects. Four MCA tools (Super Decisions, DecideIT, Decision Lab, NAIADE) are reviewed for their suitability to assess sustainability of bioenergy systems with a special focus on multi-stakeholder inclusion. The MCA tools are applied using data from a multi-stakeholder bioenergy case study in Uganda. Although contributing to only a part of a comprehensive decision process, MCA can assist in overcoming implementation barriers by (i) structuring the problem, (ii) assisting in the identification of the least robust and/or most uncertain components in bioenergy systems and (iii) integrating stakeholders into the decision process. Applying the four MCA tools to a Ugandan case study resulted in a large variability in outcomes. However, social criteria were consistently identified by all tools as being decisive in making a bioelectricity project viable