| UNEP’s Resource Panel urges consideration of wider environmental impacts of biofuels but Ecofys reports highlights difficulties of doing so
The United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management has called on governments to take greater consideration of the wider environmental impacts of biofuels and reconsider biofuel mandates, targets and quotas to make sure they don’t encourage unsustainable supply.
The recommendations come in the panel’s debut report, published in October, entitled ‘Towards Sustainable Production and Use of Resources: Assessing Biofuels’. It explains that a much more sophisticated approach needs to be taken when developing biofuels as an environmentally friendly energy option. Governments, the report adds, should think about how biofuels fit into an overall strategy for energy, climate, land use, water and agriculture. The Resource Panel was established to provide independent, coherent and authoritative scientific assessments of policy relevance on the sustainable use of natural resources and in particular their environmental impacts over the full life cycle.
“The report makes it clear that biofuels have a future role, but also underlines that there may be other options for combating climate change, improving rural livelihoods and achieving sustainable development that may, or may not involve turning ever more crops and crop wastes into liquid fuels,” said Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director.
The report, for example notes that:
• generating electricity at local power stations using wood, straw, seed oils and other crop or waste materials “is generally more energy efficient that converting biomass to liquid fuels” • land, including abandoned land, can be used for energy crops but could equally be used for re-afforestation or solar power, which the report argues may be more efficient for turning sunlight into energy • in transport, modal shifts and higher fuel efficiency standards and the development of alternative technologies such as plug-in vehicles could dramatically reduce emissions in their own right.
The report is significant in that it urges governments to place greater emphasis on the wider life cycle issues associated with biofuels. But the difficulty of doing so when it comes to one of the most important such issues – indirect land use change – has been underlined in a separate report by Dutch consultancy Ecofys.
Its report, commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment (VROM) and available from the GBEP website here, surveyed scientific efforts to quantify these indirect impacts but found no information was available on the magnitude of indirect impacts on biodiversity, that there is only limited information on the magnitude of indirect impacts on food consumption and that estimates of indirect impacts on the greenhouse gas balance of biofuels through land use cover a wide range (30-103 gCO2eq/MJ biofuel).
Ecofys reviewed five mitigation initiatives for indirect impacts, finding that mitigation measures are still in a development stage. And when it comes to monitoring of direct and indirect impacts, Ecofys finds it hardly happens today for a variety of reasons, including the difficulty of tracing effects that take place through diffuse market mechanisms.
As a result, Ecofys recommended the Ministry of VROM to focus policy on mitigation, including both long-term global solutions (going beyond biofuels to include agriculture as a whole, for example) and project-level solutions to be applied in the meantime.
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