Back to the future: the Implementation Guide of the Task Force on Sustainability

The GBEP Task Force on Sustainability, which was established in June 2008 under the leadership of the United Kingdom (and then of Sweden after 2010), developed the report The Global Bioenergy Partnership Sustainability Indicators for Bioenergy. During GBEP annual meetings last year, it was suggested to re-open it with the scope of creating an Implementation Guide on the use of the GBEP Sustainability Indicators (GSIs). In June 2015, with the endorsement of the Steering Committee, the Task Force was officially re-opened and will now be led jointly by Sweden and Ghana.

Since 2011, the GBEP sustainability indicators have been implemented in several countries: the fieldwork highlighted some cross cutting issues related to the practicality of the indicators, which were then discussed in the Activity Group 2 of the Working Group on Capacity Building, devoted to the sharing of experience on the indicators. As a result, it was proposed to create an implementation guide to address these issues and thus facilitate the future testing of the indicators.

A first round of discussions among GBEP Partners and Observers over the implementation guide took place on the occasion of the last GBEP annual meetings. One of the lessons learned from the implementation of the indicators was that there is a lack of a clear demarcation between traditional and modern bioenergy and to this end a compilation of various definitions of this term used by other relevant international organizations and initiatives was developed. This list will be included in the implementation guide together with a recommendation for users to contextualize the measurement of indicators and use this as a reference for relevance and for modern bioenergy related considerations.
The attribution of impacts to bioenergy production and use is another key issue that emerged from the testing: for each indicator, the Implementation Guide will identify and illustrate a range of suitable approaches and it will provide specific examples.
Last but not least, experience showed that implementing the GBEP indicators requires an amount of data, skill and resources that might not be available in all countries. Rather than turning down the possibility for a country to assess the sustainability of its bioenergy sector due to this lack of data, it was discussed and agreed to assess relevant good practices in bioenergy production and use to be used for this scope, and when appropriate as a complement to the measurement of the current quantitative indicators.

The Guide will also deal with the best ways to ensure an effective implementation of the indicators and will include recommendations over the following: involvement of a multidisciplinary team of experts with an in-depth knowledge of the national context and of the domestic bioenergy sector; proactive engagement of all relevant stakeholders, including government agencies, private sector organizations and civil society organizations; prioritization of empirical information over model estimates that include the assumptions used; and the inclusion of the spatial extent of the assessment and the extrapolation ofsite-level information to national-level indicators.

It was discussed and agreed to include in the Implementation Guide a reference to the linkages between the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and GSIs, both in terms of how the GSIs could contribute to the SDGs and vice versa. The forthcoming discussions in the SDGs context will add to this discussion.

All previous Task Force members will now re-instate the three sub-groups which initially worked on the indicators’ development (environmental, social and economic) to finalize the implementation guide.

Read more about this topic on the GBEP website

 

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