The WBGU report "World in Transition – Future Bioenergy and Sustainable Land Use"

By Astrid Schulz, Research Analyst, Climate and Energy for the WBGU

The incipient global bioenergy boom is giving rise to vigorous and strongly polarized debates. Supporters of bioenergy argue that bioenergy can help to secure energy supply and to mitigate climate change as well as create development opportunities in rural areas. Critics, on the other hand, maintain that growing energy crops will heighten land-use conflicts as food cultivation, nature conservation and bioenergy production compete for land, and that bioenergy is likely to impact negatively on the climate. WBGU aims to show that the sustainable use of bioenergy is possible and to outline how to exploit opportunities, while at the same time minimizing risks.

Gear bioenergy policy towards clear goals
The guiding principle behind the change of direction that is required in bioenergy policy must, in WBGU’s view, be the strategic role of bioenergy as a component of the global transformation of energy systems towards sustainability. Firstly, the use of bioenergy should contribute to mitigating climate change by replacing fossil fuels. In the long term, bioenergy in combination with carbon dioxide capture and secure storage can even help to remove some of the emitted CO2 from the atmosphere. Secondly, the use of bioenergy can help to overcome energy poverty. Some 2.5 billion people currently have no access to affordable and safe forms of energy (such as electricity and gas) to meet their basic needs.

There is a sustainable bioenergy potential
WBGU has undertaken a model-based estimation of the global sustainable potential of energy crops considering sustainability requirements with regard to food security, biodiversity conservation and climate protection. Bioenergy, however, includes more than the use of specially cultivated energy crops. There is a large potential in using wastes and residues. WBGU estimates the total sustainable technical potential of bioenergy in the year 2050 to be 80–170 Exajoule (EJ) per year. This represents around a quarter of current global energy use and less than one-tenth of the expected level of global energy use in 2050. This potential may amount to around a half of the sustainable technical potential, partly due to economic reasons or because the area in question is one of political conflict. In view of these figures the importance of bioenergy should not be overestimated, but the expected scale is nonetheless significant.

A global regulatory framework is necessary
The utilization of this potential should only be promoted if undesirable developments can be excluded. In particular, the use of bioenergy must not endanger food security or the goals of nature conservation and climate protection. Many of the current incentives, e.g. the modalities for determining contributions to commitments under the Kyoto Protocol or blending quotas for biofules, may even promote bioenergy use that is harmful to the climate. In order to steer the sustainable use of bioenergy, WBGU proposes a global regulatory framework for a sustainable bioenergy policy. The key elements of such a framework are a revised UN climate regime with corrected incentives, the setting of sustainability standards, and accompanying measures to safeguard sustainability.  This will be accomplished by strengthening and developing international environmental and development regimes (such as the biodiversity and desertification conventions). Within this framework, WBGU formulates promotion strategies with the aim of furthering efficient, innovative technologies and increasing investment in necessary infrastructure – thus contributing to climate change mitigation and overcoming energy poverty.

Bioenergy should be used preferentially for electricity production
For climate protection, mainly those bioenergy pathways can be recommended that avoid high emissions from land-use change due to the cultivation of energy crops. This applies to the use of wastes and residues, or to the cultivation of perennial energy crops on marginal or degraded land. Furthermore, biomass for energy should be used efficiently and replace fossil fuels with high CO2 emissions, predominantly coal. This is best deployed in the electricity sector. The use of bioenergy geared towards the goal of climate change mitigation could thus avoid greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 5-10 percent of today’s total emissions. Therefore, WBGU recommends to use bioenergy for production of electricity and not to use it as biofuel for transport purposes.  Instead, electro-mobility should be promoted.

Modernize bioenergy use in developing countries
It is often overlooked that modern bioenergy currently plays only a small part in global bioenergy use, representing about 10 percent of the total. The lion’s share – almost 90 percent of the total – is accounted for by traditional bioenergy, which involves burning wood, charcoal, biogenic residues or dung, mainly on inefficient three-stone hearths. More than 1.5 million people a year die from pollution caused by open fires. Simple technical improvements to stoves can - to a large extent - prevent the health risks posed by biomass use, while at the same time doubling or even quadrupling its efficiency. The process of modernizing traditional bioenergy use or replacing it with other – preferably renewable – forms of energy can therefore provide important leverage for poverty reduction worldwide, a fact that has been often neglected in the debate on bioenergy and development policy.

Land-use management as new global challenge
The sustainable use of fuels derived from energy crops can be an important component in the transformation towards sustainable energy systems with the potential to bridge technology until the middle of the century. By then, the growth in wind and solar energy production is likely to be highly advanced that sufficient energy will be available from these sources. At the same time, the pressures on global land use will have increased significantly, principally as a result of three factors: the growth in a world population, whose food consumption patterns are increasingly land-intensive; the increasing demand for land to crop biomass as an industrial feedstock; and, not least, the impacts of climate change. As a result, the cultivation of energy crops will probably have to be reduced in the second half of the century, while the use of biogenic wastes and residues will be able to continue. In view of these escalating trends, the problem of competing land use is a potential source of future conflict with implications ranging far beyond the field of bioenergy. Global land-use management is therefore a key task for future international policy-making and an essential requirement for a sustainable bioenergy policy.

The flagship report "World in Transition – Future Bioenergy and Sustainable Land Use" is available at  http://www.wbgu.de/wbgu_jg2008_engl.html

The Website of the WBGU provides additional information and reports: http://www.wbgu.de/wbgu_jg2008_engl.html

Published in:ECC-Newsletter, December 2008