Fueling Biodiversity

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Fueling Biodiversity

Geneva, 5 October 2007 - The Netherlands is one of the biggest importers of palm oil for biofuels. However, recent studies illustrate that harvesting oil from Southeast Asia, in particular Indonesia and Malaysia where 85% of commercial palm oil is grown, causes major carbon emissions through the destruction of rainforests and the draining and burning of peat land.
“As a biofuel, it’s a failure,” said Marcel Silvius, a climate change expert for Wetlands International, in an interview with the Associated Press.
Even though global efforts to decrease greenhouse gas emissions are increasingly concentrating on biofuels, numerous energy companies have put on hold plans to switch to palm oil. They are actually homing in on other solutions, including the possibility of moving towards so-called “second generation” biofuels that go beyond palm oil, corn (maize) and sugarcane as feedstocks.
First generation biofuels can degrade biodiversity because they traditionally use grains (wheat, corn, soybean), sugarcane and palm oil grown on the cleared forest land of wetlands. Some of these biofuels require almost as much energy to produce as they offer as fuels. They can affect food security as choices are made between using a crop as food or fuel, and because using farmland to plant for fuels can make food crops scarcer and more expensive. This could bring food shortages to poorer countries that rely on food imports and food aid.
The race to produce biofuels is also driving up land prices. As land prices go up, people who cannot prove tenure are pushed off their land to make way for commercial exploitation, as is happening in Brazil.
While first generation biofuels focus on corn and sugar and do not use all of the plant, second-generation biofuels use more of the feedstock, including the waste, to generate the fuel. The technology allows fuel to be made from any plant material.
“You can exchange food for energy,” said Fernando Almeida, BCSD Brazil (CEBDS) at the WBCSD’s March Liaison Delegates meeting in Montreux, Switzerland, but “be very careful, for when you solve a problem for one side of the world, you create problems for another.”
Cultivation of biofuels also brings with it risks of soil erosion, soil compaction, nutrient leaching, water use, declining crop diversity, and declining farmland diversity. Forestry risks stem from the conversion of forestland to agricultural uses, leading to species loss, habitat loss/fragmentation, declining site fertility, soil erosion and declining forestry diversity, not to mention competition for resources from other industry sectors that rely on forests for their primary products.
Similarly, there is the question of the amount of virtual water required to produce biofuels. For example, according to www.waterfootprint.org, as much as 1,300 liters of water are required to produce 1kg of wheat.
However, second generation biofuels could be used to increase biodiversity and help restore prairies, as flowering plants provide more useable energy per acre than corn fuel ethanol or soybean diesel and are far better for the environment. According to some estimates, prairie flowers provide 238% more bioenergy on average when there is a diverse mixture rather than a single species. The shift from annual to perennial crops also reduces the need to plough and till the fields, reducing the agricultural risks.
But “it will take second generation technology to make that work ... and it’s about commercializing that science,” said WBCSD’s George Weyerhaeuser, also at the Montreux meeting.
The second generation biofuels market could encourage forest landscape restoration through cleaner water, timber production and nature conservation, rather than simply maximizing tree cover on individual forest sites. Opportunities include incentives for forest landscapes by keeping forest land in forests and returning degraded agricultural lands to forest, which is good for nature conservation and clean water production, and reducing fire risk by getting rid of the fuel buildup in the understory (the area of a forest which grows in the shade of forest canopy).
But the challenge remains to create the enabling factors for biofuels to
enhance biodiversity. Some of these enabling factors include:
Environmental guidelines;
Planning processes to promote environmentally beneficial cropping and forestry;
Certification to inform intermediary buyers and endconsumers, thereby enabling differentiation in the marketplace and allowing people to make informed choices;
Technological innovations to get to the second generation quicker.
The standards should be appropriate for and applicable to all feedstocks, practical to implement and use, and cover the full life cycle. An energy company such as BP could have a role in doing an objective, thorough life cycle analysis of biofuels through its US$ 500 million energy bioscience institute based at the Universities of Berkeley and Illinois. “One option is to pursue regulation… another is to create market value and let customers differentiate to marginalize the nonsustainable processes,” said IUCN’s Andrea Athanas, also in Montreux.


Nuno Oliveira
Coordenador Estratégia ‘Business and Biodiversity’ e ‘Countdown 2010’
(+351) 96 294 02 09