trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

Agricultural land is becoming a scarce resource and decisions made on energy policy e.g. in the EUhave consequences on the global land use. At the moment the rapid increase in biomass cultivation forbiofuels is driven by volume targets rather than by land use planning (Bringezu et al., 2009). This isreflected also in some demand-driven scenarios and estimations, which make assumptions that do nottake into account the actual land availability necessary to support very high yields of energy crops.Sustainable use and equitable sharing of natural resources are political questions. The values and powerrelations that affect global natural resource policies need to be debated widely in the society and theissue of sustainable land use goes far beyond the local or regional land use policies.The problems related to the sustainability of the large scale production of biofuel feed stocks arewidely known, and the EU is setting sustainability criteria for the biofuels that are imported to the EU.However, from the large body of research made on the actual sustainability of large scale biofuelproduction, one may conclude that the current trend of centralised agroindustrial biofuel production forthe markets in the industrialised countries is not without serious drawbacks. It can be argued that theaggressive promotion of biofuels, carried out by the EU and the US, is a way of buying time. In the lightof the research on the topic, substituting fossil fuels and curbing CO 2 emissions with biofuels is notpossible without causing intolerable damage to the food security, ecosystems and human rights globally.The most important decisions on how to dramatically cut the fossil energy consumption in Westernsocieties are not solved with bioenergy.AppendixTable 1. A summary of the studies included in Figure 1.StudyIIASA-WECRIGESLESS/BIBattjesFischerSmeetsApproachEnergy Economy model, sixscenariosBottom-up energy supplyconstruction.Scenario extension of RIGES,using updated oil and gasresource estimates andincluding CO2 sequestrationIntegrated land use/energyeconomymodel +expertjudgementBottom-up calculation byusing land use model of IIASABottom-up approach, basedon an evaluation of data andstudies on relevant factorsTimeframe1990-21001985-20501990-2100GeographicaggregationResourcefocused11 regions X11 regions Xa X11 regions Xa X2050 13 regions X1990-205011 regions X2050 11 regions XDemanddrivena These studies have an upper limit of biomass energy availability for their demand driven scenario,based on a resource assessment (Berndes et al., 2003)237