Land use
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Information about biofuels and bioenergy and land use.
Contents |
Introduction
Land use is a critical notion to understand direct and indirect impacts of any anthropic activity on landscapes. The amount of land available in a given country or region must theoretically be compared to the country/region's needs in terms of food production, energy production, development of infrastructures or nature conservation, in order to establish a consistent and fair global land use strategy. Countries may have a deficit or an excess of land available; in the first case, land use becomes a problematic equation as priorities must be established. Whereas food production and conservation of nature should be the first priorities, timber, tourism or energy production are sometimes given way to generate quick profit.
Land use change as such is not necessarily an issue, because the new use that is made from land can be more beneficial for nature and people than the former one. However, land use change may also be responsible for a massive discharge of the carbon originally stored in the soil. The consequence is an increase of the amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere, which can, in the case of biofuels, considerably reduce the overall saving of GHG over the biofuel's life cycle. Complex issues arise when a change in land use displaces the former use into another region within or outside the country of concern. The consequences of this indirect land use change (iLUC) should theoretically be accounted in the impact assessment of the original production, which caused the iLUC. However, the complexity of this issue (especially, determining where iLUC happens and its intensity) makes difficult its inclusion in the impact assessment.
Resources
- UN-IPCC Special Report on Land Use, Land-Use Change And Forestry, by Robert T. Watson (Chief Scientist and Director of Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development at The World Bank and Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), Ian R. Noble (Professor of Global Change Research in the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University and Chief Executive Officer of the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Accounting at the Research School of Biological Sciences, Australian National University), Bert Bolin (former Professor of Meteorology at the University of Stockholm and Director of the International Institute for Meteorology, and former Scientific Director at the European Space Research Organisation. Dr. Bolin served as Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from 1988-1997) N.H. Ravindranath (Principal Research Scientist at the Centre for ASTRA and Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science), David J. Verardo (Environmental Scientist for the IPCC Working Group II Technical Support Unit, Washington DC, USA) and David J. Dokken (Project Administrator for the IPCC Working Group II Technical Support Unit, Washington DC, USA).
- RSB Workshop on biofuels, deforestation and land-use change, held in São Paulo on the 20th and 21st of November 2008. Presentations included LU case studies from Central and South America, Asia and West Africa, mapping and monitoring of sugarcane expansion in Brazil, and the state-of-the art in terms of LUC modelling.
Issues
Events
2008
- 20-21 November 2008, São Paulo, Brazil: Understanding the links between biofuels, macro-economic trends and Land Use Change. The Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels invited about 60 experts from 17 countries to discuss about current LUC models and enhance new interactions with field specialists. Case studies from Brazil, China, Central America, Philippines, Argentina, West Africa, India and Cambodia were presented to better understand local drivers of LUC and deforestation in these regions. These were followed by the presentations of some of the most important LUC under use nowadays: Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP), Food and Agriculture Policy Research Institute (FAPRI), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, McKinsey, etc.
- 22-26 September 2008, Gummersbach, Germany: SCOPE Rapid Assessment: Biofuels: Environmental Consequences and Interactions with Changing Land Use. (Themes: biofuels, land use change, biodiversity, technology)
News
- Biofuel producers warn EU over "unjustifiably complex" sustainability rules, 7 November 2008 by BusinessGreen: "Eight developing countries have written to the EU warning they will complain to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) if it passes proposed legislation designed to improve the environmental sustainability of biofuels by restricting the types of fuels the bloc imports."
- "The EU is considering legislation that is intended to ban the purchase of biofuels from energy crop plantations that are believed to harm the environment and lead to food shortages by displacing land used for food crops and contributing to rainforest deforestation."
- "[E]ight countries – Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Malawi, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Indonesia and Malaysia – have written to the EU to protest against the proposals" in a letter that "claims that the new rules would 'impose unjustifiably complex requirements on producers' and argues that environmental criteria 'relating to land-use change will impinge disproportionately on developing countries'."[1]
- Forests to fall for food and fuel, 13 July 2008 by BBC News: "Demand for land to grow food, fuel crops and wood is set to outstrip supply, leading to the probable destruction of forests, a report warns."
- "The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) says only half of the extra land needed by 2030 is available without eating into tropical forested areas."
- Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis, 4 July 2008 in The Guardian: "Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian."
- The report "argues that production of biofuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher."[2]
- U.S. May Free Up More Land for Corn Crops, 21 June 2008 in the New York Times. "Signs are growing that the government may allow farmers to plant crops on millions of acres of conservation land, while a chorus of voices is also pleading with Washington to cut requirements for ethanol production."..."Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and one of Capitol Hill’s main voices on farm policy, on Friday urged the Agriculture Department to release tens of thousands of farmers from contracts under which they had promised to set aside huge tracts as natural habitat."
References
- Climate change, biofuels and eco-social impacts in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado (PDF file). by Donald Sawyer. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Volume 363, February 2008, Pages 1747–1752.
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