Biofuels need not endanger rainforest

Forthcoming proposals for legislation on biofuels will contain provisions to prevent the destruction of land "of high nature value", a European Voice debate heard this week (6 February).

European Commission officials are working on such ideas as ruling ineligible for public subsidy biofuel crops grown from land that before a set date fell into a defined category of high nature value. Such crops might not count towards the targets for biofuel use set for member states in the proposed biofuels legislation.

Paul Hodson, a member of the renewable energy unit in the Commission’s transport and energy department, was speaking as a member of a panel discussing ‘Developing biofuels sustainably in the EU’.

He sought to counter concern expressed from the audience that biofuels were contributing to destruction of tropical rainforest. He said that it was obvious from what had been said in the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers and "what is going on in the real world" that in the proposal to amend the biofuels directive it would be essential to contain a provision that avoided public subsidy going towards biodiesel made from palm oil from land that had been deforested.

That would not, he said, end deforestation, because "the vast majority of global palm oil is and will continue to be used for things other than making biodiesel" such as food and feed, but the biofuel sector would be "in the lead in tackling this problem".

While acknowledging that the proposal once it emerged would then be subject to change by the Council and Parliament, Hodson said that defining what was bad practice was actually the simplest part of the problem.

"The difficult things are how do you check whether the thing is actually bad and how do you do that in a way that doesn’t kill the industry by imposing such heavy administrative burdens on it or only favour large producers and not smaller ones."

The audience heard accounts of emerging certification schemes being developed for biofuels.

Another difficulty, Hodson said, was guarding against the knock-on effects, in which crops for biofuels might be produced sustainably, but would increase the pressure on land and resources.

He expressed optimism that the EU could meet its biofuel targets from domestic production and that could come from land that was currently farmland and not of high nature value.

Swedish MEP Anders Wijkman said that rainforests were being cut down and the international community had to attach a value to standing forests.

Ruth Davis of BirdLife International, a conservation group, accused the Commission of "some disingenuity". Any additional pressure on land use was going to drive deforestation, she said. Giving a signal that there was going to be an ever-increasing market for biofuels, would, she suggested, increase the appetite for destroying forests. She described the Commission’s safeguards as "fairly feeble".

James Primrose of BP said that he was afraid that the Commission would not set robust goals but would only set the objectives and leave the member states to sort out the details so that "we will see 27 different types of sustainability schemes throughout Europe". Audience members accused national governments of favouring their own farming sectors in their choice of which biofuel technologies to promote.

Wijkman questioned why the target proposed by the Commission for biofuels as a proportion of road transport fuel use was 10% by 2020, which he suggested, would please the oil companies because it was so achievable.

Others questioned the use of volume targets rather than their greenhouse gas reduction effects. Hodson referred to the climate change reduction targets in the recently proposed review of the fuel quality directive.

Inneke Herreman of IMACE, the European margarine association, highlighted the developing competition for resources, particularly oil from rapeseed, between the food industry and the biofuels industry.

Forthcoming proposals for legislation on biofuels will contain provisions to prevent the destruction of land "of high nature value", a European Voice debate heard this week (6 February).