GBEP Partners assess international perspectives on indirect land-use change


In order to navigate the complexities of bioenergy’s indirect impacts, an information session was held in November in Rome specifically on the topic of indirect land-use change (ILUC) as part of GBEP’s Task Force on Sustainability's workstream on indirect effects of bioenergy. A first workshop was held on this subject in New York last year.

The discussion was framed around an information paper prepared by Ecofys, which participated in the session on behalf of UK, setting out the key indirect effects of bioenergy production and consumption and the main mechanisms causing these indirect effects. The report provided an up-to-date insight into the science relating to ILUC from bioenergy: the mechanisms that cause ILUC; the various approaches to quantifying ILUC; the extent to which these approaches converge or diverge, and why; and the various approaches that are being developed to mitigate ILUC.

Since land requirements are a key concern for environmental, social and economic sustainability issues, controlling direct and indirect LUC effects is a major challenge to ensure sustainable energy crop production, Ecofys said in its paper. Given how LUC often transcends national borders and involves a wide variety of crop types, any mechanism aiming to resolve indirect effects will need to take these complexities into account.

Presentations were also made during the workshop by the US Environmental Protection Agency, the European Commission and Brazil (ICONE) on recent developments in scientific research and policymaking in this area. All the presentations are available on the GBEP website. The Partnership is currently working on an inventory of policies on ILUC, with a draft for internal review due by the end of the year. A follow-up ILUC workshop was proposed for March 2011, when mitigation responses and a sustainability indicator on indirect effects could be explored.

The GBEP workshop in Rome came just one month after the publication of an important new report by E4Tech for the UK Department of Transport. The study looked at the ILUC impacts of the five biofuels expected to form the main supply of biofuel in the UK in the next 10 years: palm, soy and oilseed rape biodiesel and sugarcane and wheat bioethanol.

E4Tech was asked to use a method known as causal-descriptive modelling as this approach is transparent and all assumptions made by the modelling team can be seen and questioned. The aim was 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,” the Department of Transport stated. “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.”

 

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