A causal descriptive approach to modelling indirect land use change impacts of biofuels

Oct 2010

The Department commissioned E4Tech to study the Indirect Land Use Change (ILUC) impacts of the five biofuels expected to form the main supply of biofuel in the UK in the next ten years: palm, soy and oilseed rape biodiesel and sugarcane and wheat bioethanol. A causal-descriptive modelling method was used, as this approach is transparent and all assumptions made by the modelling team can be seen and questioned. Our objectives were to better understand the scale of ILUC emissions from these biofuels, to add transparency to the calculation of such emissions and to understand factors that can reduce the ILUC emissions for these biofuels.
The report from E4Tech provides a valuable contribution to the existing work on ILUC. In particular the study succeeds in shedding light on the complexity of calculating ILUC emissions and where there are uncertainties due to both limitations in data and knowledge of how future markets will develop. The study demonstrates that these causal-descriptive models can make significant contributions to our understanding ILUC. However, as with all ILUC studies, the results of this work are limited by the scenarios and assumptions that could be tested. The precise size of the ILUC factors reported in this study should be treated with caution.

By: E4Tech

 
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