An Over Time Multi-Criteria Accounting of a Brazilian Bamboo Plantation

The environmental accounting of a Brazilian bamboo plantation was carried out with the application of five different methods based on the same set of inventory data, which provide a consistent exam of the system’s performance and the comparability of calculated indicators. To obtain a comprehensive assessment, indicators built for larger regional or global scales were used in joint with local scale indicators. The bamboo plantation was evaluated for a period of 25 years, including implantation, adaptation and operation stages. It was concluded that multi criteria assessments aggregate results from methods, based on the same set of input data, and each method gives a measure of the effort to obtain a given input. However, each metric refers to a different effort, and though sometimes the resource use is associated with economic or environmental costs, the effort that each method considers must be taken into consideration.