| Dutch study outlines difficulties in monitoring bioenergy macro-impacts
The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) has published a report commissioned by the Dutch government on ‘Monitoring macro-impacts of bioenergy’, providing an overview of existing monitoring systems and the availability of relevant data.
The study draws on the conclusions of the Cramer Committee of the Netherlands, which found that indirect impacts of biomass production cannot be assessed and controlled only at the consignment or production level. Reporting on an appropriate set of macro-indicators is also needed to address impacts at a higher (regional or national) level, an activity called macro-monitoring.
For bioenergy, macro-monitoring of land use, greenhouse gas savings, loss of biodiversity and water use is needed, the agency said. Economic and social macro-impacts can be covered by inventories of food prices, production statistics, changes in trade flows, income distributions and labour practices.
Still, various deficiencies were found. For example, global biophysical statistics are often available, but their quality remains debatable, especially data on greenhouse gas balances with respect to land use (from UNFCCC) and data on forestry (from FAO). Macro-monitoring cannot provide sufficient information on the indirect impacts on biodiversity and water use, partly because of imprecise definitions. In addition, the report found national statistics on economic and social data need to be improved.
Since macro-monitoring of bioenergy data encompasses many different dimensions over different geographical scales, what is preferably needed is a global condensation point for all data and knowledge; this would make monitoring more effective by proposing corrective actions that can be taken either unilaterally or multilaterally and either preventive or curative, the PBL said. Meanwhile, bilateral contacts between bioenergy importing and exporting countries are crucial to gain experience of linking global satellite data with national statistics and local knowledge. To improve local, objective insights, collaboration with NGOs is recommended.
Even after this work, however, key areas of dispute will remain, such as whether and to what extent monitored changes are attributable to bioenergy production and whether such changes, if rightly ascribed to bioenergy production, are judged to be positive, negative but acceptable or not acceptable.
You can download the publication from the PBL website.
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