A group of scientists and economists has called on the EU to recognise the effects that using food crops for biofuel has on carbon emissions.

In a letter sent to the European Commission today (7 October), the group of more than 150 experts said the Commission must recognise and take account of changes in land-use when assessing greenhouse-gas emissions from different sources of biofuel.

The scientists want the Commission to assign specific values for different crops used to produce biofuel to take account of indirect land-use change (ILUC) – such as biofuel crops displacing food crops on previously uncultivated land that might, for instance, host environmentally valuable woodland.

The group said: “Without addressing land-use chance, the European Union’s target for renewable energy in transport may fail to deliver genuine carbon savings in the real world. It could end up as merely an exercise on paper that promotes widespread deforestation and higher food prices.” 

The Commission is due to decide in the coming weeks how to deal with ILUC in its approach to assessing the greenhouse-gas reductions delivered by using biofuel. The EU has set a target of using biofuel in 10% of transport fuel by 2020. But the carbon dioxide emissions from the sources of biofuel used have to be 50% lower than those from conventional fossil fuels. According to some scientific studies, biofuel from oilseeds and soya can generate higher emissions than fossil fuels if the ILUC effects are included in the calculations.

An internal note of a meeting in July between Günther Oettinger, the European commissioner for energy, and Connie Hedegaard, the European commissioner for climate action, says that the Commission will not propose ILUC values for specific biofuels until 2014. They want to have more reliable scientific advice about precise ILUC effects.            

The scientists’ letter says: “There are uncertainties inherent in estimating the magnitude of indirect land-use emissions from biofuels, but a policy that implicitly or explicitly assigns a value of zero is clearly not supported by the science.”

The letter was organised by the Union of Concerned Scientists, based in the US.

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