UN warns on dangers of bioenergy
UN warns on dangers of bioenergy
mongabay.com
May 9, 2007
Biofuels offer “an extraordinary opportunity” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but could make “substantial demands on the world’s land and water resources at a time when demand for both food and forest products is also rising rapidly,” said the U.N. in its first assessment on the growing bioenergy industry.
The report, Sustainable energy: A framework for decision-makers, stated that while modern bioenergy could help to meet the needs of 1.6 billion people who lacked access to electricity and 2.4 billion people who relied on the use of traditional biomass, a political framework was needed to ensure that they benefited from bioenergy.
“Biofuels accounted for the fastest-growing market for agricultural products around the world and was a billion-dollar business,” said Alexander Muller, Assistant Director-General for the Sustainable Development Department of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), at a press conference at the U.N. headquarters in New York. Increasing oil prices in recent years had devastating effects on many poor countries, some of which spent six times as much on fuel as they did on health. In that regard, the modern form of bioenergy could create great opportunity. The report provided a framework for the worldwide use of bioenergy, not only for developed and industrialized countries in mitigating the effects of climate change, but also for the poorest countries to gain access to modern forms of electricity.”
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“One quarter of the world’s population [does] not have access to power,” added UN-Energy Chairman Mats Karlsson. “Bioenergy, a source of energy that [takes] sunshine and water and [transforms] it into power through photosynthesis, [brings] with it many challenges. In that regard, the report [pits] together different perspectives on bioenergy’s role in the future.”
Gustavo Best, UN-Energy’s Vice-Chairman, said there nine key sustainability issues facing bioenergy development including the implications for food security, health and gender, trade, foreign exchange balances and energy, the environment, social equity, security and climate change. He said that unless new policies were enacted to steer bioenergy use, the environmental and social damages could in some cases outweigh the benefits.
Best cited food security as an example, noting that “the availability of adequate food supplies could be threatened by biofuel production to the extent that land, water and other productive resources were diverted away from food production.” Nevertheless, he said, the dangers need to be weighed by the opportunities.
“Modern bioenergy could make energy services more widely and cheaply available in remote rural areas, supporting productivity growth in agriculture or other sectors with positive implications for food availability and access,” said Best. “To some extent, the report [shows] how food security risks were the mirror image of opportunities.”
Best also suggested that biofuels could help add value to agricultural products but could “result in concentration of ownership that could drive the world’s poorest farmers off their land and into deeper poverty.”
Environmentalists have expressed concern that biofuels production is driving deforestation of biodiverse rainforests in the Amazon and southeast Asia. Best acknowledged the risks of palm oil production in Indonesia but said “the difficulty was that what worked in one country did not work in another. Planting palm oil was good in one country, but not in another. There was no straightforward answer.”
Green groups have argued that biofuel trend “is being driven by big agricultural interests looking for new markets,” according to the Associated Press (AP).
“More and more, people are realizing that there are serious environmental and serious food security issues involved in biofuels,” the AP quoting Greenpeace biofuels expert Jan van Aken as saying. “There is more to the environment than climate change. Climate change is the most pressing issue, but you cannot fight climate change by large deforestation in Indonesia.”
Best said that these positives and negatives make bioenergy policy “complex.”
“Bioenergy [bridges] two complex worlds, the energy world and the agricultural world,” said Best. “The report [provides] key areas of discussion that countries could look at in making decisions in a more informed and solid manner. Given the need for a high degree of policy integration, the report identified several ideas for international cooperation, including cooperation between regions and countries.”
Best said he hoped the report would “contribute to a multi-stakeholder approach to bioenergy, resulting perhaps in a code of conduct.”
“Bioenergy [has] the potential to reduce poverty, but done in the wrong way, the opposite [will] happen… Any bioenergy strategy must ensure that poor people did not end up paying for the fact that the industrialized world needed more bioenergy,” concluded Muller.
U.N.-Energy is a consortium of 20 U.N. agencies and programs.
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