| GBEP indicators’ work in progress in Colombia, Ghana and Indonesia
The Global Bioenergy Partnership (GBEP) developed in May 2011 a set of 24 relevant, practical, science-based, voluntary indicators regarding the sustainability of all forms of bioenergy. Together with the respective application methodologies they constitute the GBEP Report on Sustainability Indicators for Bioenergy, which was published in December 2011. To establish their feasibility and enhance their practicality as a tool for policymaking, a number of pilot testing project have been started in a diverse range of national contexts. The first of the GBEP Partners to have tested the indicators at national level, Japan in 2011 has conducted a piloting study of the Biodiesel Fuel (BDF) production in the city of Kyoto.
Other piloting projects are currently being implemented in Ghana, Indonesia and Colombia. The pilot project in Ghana started in November 2011 and is conducted by the Government of Ghana in close cooperation with the ECOWAS Regional Centre for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (ECREEE). Financially supported by the Dutch Government, it is coordinated by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and it has so far established a Policy Stakeholder Group which selected 12 indicators for the pilot project and the research institutes to carry out the pilot. The project, focussed on existing data, will assess their usefulness, availability and quality, will provide recommendations for improved data collection and use and will propose baseline values for the most important (sub) indicators. All information gathered and lessons learned in Ghana is meant to be shared with other countries within the ECOWAS community, and in this sense the project was presented at the GBEP/ECOWAS Bioenergy Forum held in Mali in March 2012.
The two ongoing projects in Colombia and Indonesia, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) and implemented by FAO through the GBEP Secretariat, started in October 2011. The projects aim to assess and enhance the capacity of these two countries to measure the GBEP indicators and use them to inform bioenergy policymaking, while at the same time providing lessons about how to apply the indicators as a tool for sustainable development and enhance their practicality. In particular, the project in Indonesia, which was recently presented at the recent GBEP Seminar in Rio de Janeiro, is progressing on the collection of both primary data, obtained from farmer and community surveys in the locations of bioenergy producers and of the bioenergy processing plants (Riau Province for biodiesel, Lampung for bioethanol, and West-Java for biogas); and secondary ones, obtained from literature study and other sources. The project has so far resulted in a very good collaboration with different stakeholders involved and will produce maps of the country providing a spatial evaluation of bioenergy. A successive phase of training activities will be developed towards the end of the project mainly to enhance the capacity of the country to measure GBEP indicators in the future with a view to inform bioenergy policy-making towards sustainable development of bioenergy in the country. Additionally, regional workshops will be organized in order to lay the foundations for South-South cooperation in the region.
The GBEP indicators are being implemented in Germany and in the Netherlands, and are expected to be soon tested also in Argentina, Italy and the United States of America. The status and results of all the piloting projects will be presented at the next GBEP meetings in November 2012 in Rome.
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