Worse than diesel and gasoline? Bioenergy as bad as fossils if there is no pricing of CO2 emissions from land-use change

“Our results show: The state of current global land regulation is inadequate to control land-use-change emissions from modern biofuels”, lead author Leon Merfort explains. “If cultivation for bioenergy grasses is not strictly limited to marginal or abandoned land, food production could shift and agricultural land use expand into natural land. This would cause substantial carbon dioxide emissions due to forest clearing in regions with weak or no land regulation”. These indirect effects of bioenergy use are a challenge for policy makers, as food and bioenergy markets are globally connected but beyond the control of individual national policies.  Tragically, the regulatory gap in the land-use sector would keep bioenergy supply cheap, while pushing the energy sector to phase-out fossil fuels even faster to compensate for additional emissions from land-use change. This spiral in turn increases the demand for bioenergy.

To investigate the implications of bioenergy induced land-use change emissions under sectorally fragmented policies, the researchers coupled energy and land system models to derive alternative transformation pathways consistent with limiting global warming to well below 2 °C. These pathways include varying assumptions on land-use and energy policies, as these have a large influence on CO₂ emissions from land-use change and also affect the amount of bioenergy used to fulfill the global energy demand. By comparing these scenarios with a corresponding counterfactual scenario with no bioenergy production  and hence lower land-use-change emissions, the researchers were able to derive emission factors, which attribute CO₂ emissions from land-use change to bioenergy production in the light of different policy frameworks.

Putting a price on emissions from land-use change to achieve climate neutrality