Under current land-use regulation, carbon dioxide emissions from biofuel production exceed those from fossil diesel combustion. Therefore, international agreements need to ensure the effective and globally comprehensive protection of natural land before modern bioenergy can effectively contribute to achieving carbon neutrality.
Recommendations for policy
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Pushing for globally comprehensive land protection is the most effective way to reduce the high indirect land-use-change emissions associated with modern biofuel production from energy crops.
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A price on all CO2 emissions from land clearing — not limited to direct bioenergy-related land conversion — is an effective and efficient instrument to protect land and reduce emissions from biofuels.
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Pricing all land carbon pools even at a substantial discount below the energy sector CO2 price is more effective than a full protection scheme that covers only 90% of all forests globally.
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Given the deficiencies of current global land protection, indirect greenhouse gas emissions from biofuels need to be regulated as stringently as greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.
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Combining biofuel production with carbon capture and storage can mitigate the high emissions, but even then, biofuels have a negative climate balance on a 30-year time horizon.
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Further reading
Wise, M. et al. Implications of limiting CO2 concentrations for land use and energy. Science 324, 1183–1186 (2009). This study showed how bioenergy in an uncontrolled land-use system leads to massive land-use-change CO2 emissions that are self-amplifying due to feedback with the energy sector, where the lower remaining carbon budget increases the demand for bioenergy.
Yeh, S., Witcover, J., Lade, G. E. & Sperling, D. A review of low carbon fuel policies: principles, program status and future directions. Energy Policy 97, 220–234 (2016). This study gives an overview of the status of low-carbon fuel standards (in particular biofuel policies) and shows that current policies aimed at promoting biofuels to reduce carbon emissions rely on specific biofuel EFs (‘carbon intensity standards’).
Daioglou, V. et al. Progress and barriers in understanding and preventing indirect land-use change. Biofuel. Bioprod. Biorefin. 14, 924–934 (2020). This literature review on indirect land-use change from biofuels supports one of our main findings that indirect land-use change EFs are a poor guiding principle for evaluating the climate impact of biofuels due to high uncertainties.
Heck, V., Gerten, D., Lucht, W. & Popp, A. Biomass-based negative emissions difficult to reconcile with planetary boundaries. Nat. Clim. Change 8, 151–155 (2018). This study with a focus on bioenergy with carbon capture and storage shows the adverse side effects of bioenergy production in addition to the potentially high CO2 emissions.
Luderer, G. et al. Impact of declining renewable energy costs on electrification in low-emission scenarios. Nat. Energy 7, 32–42 (2022). This study shows how declining renewable-energy costs can substantially reduce the reliance on carbonaceous fuels (such as biofuels) without missing climate targets.
Acknowledgements
The research leading to these results has received funding by the DIPOL from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under grant number 01LA1809A (L.M., N.B. and J.S.). This work was supported by the NAVIGATE project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant number 821124 (N.B., F.H. and J.S.), by the RESCUE project from the European Union’s Horizon Europe program under grant number 101056939 (L.M.) and by the ARIADNE project from BMBF under grant number 03SFK5A (D.K. and G.L.).
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Merfort, L., Bauer, N., Humpenöder, F. et al. State of global land regulation inadequate to control biofuel land-use-change emissions. Nat. Clim. Chang. 13, 610–612 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01711-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01711-7
