Abstract
Biobased materials may help to achieve a renewable, circular economy, but their impact could be similar to those of non-renewable materials. In the case of biofuels, the indirect land use change (ILUC) effects determine whether they can provide sustainability benefits compared to fossil fuels. ILUC modeling estimates have large uncertainties, making them difficult to include in a policy aiming at reducing environmental impacts. The Renewable Energy Directive (RED) II reduced ILUC estimate uncertainties by shifting the focus from ILUC environmental impacts to ILUC risk. Nevertheless, this does not take into account either certifiable additionality practices to reduce the ILUC risk for the production of biobased materials, or biobased materials other than biofuels. Here we propose a simple, user-friendly tool to bridge the gap between ILUC modeling and policy, by estimating the ILUC risk of biobased material production and to assess by how much different additionality practices can reduce that risk at different levels of the value chain. This was done by explicitly including the additionality practices in an ILUC model, simplifying the model to a spreadsheet tool that relates automatically the input provided by the user, which may be a producer or a policy maker, with a certain ILUC risk. We demonstrate the functioning of the tool on two examples: maize production in Iowa and in Romania. In Iowa, maize production is already very intensive, so the additionality practices proposed have little effect on its ILUC risk category, and the low-ILUC-risk-produced maize would amount to 0.03 t ha−1 year−1. In Romania there is ample margin for implementation of additionality practices, and thus a large potential to reduce the ILUC risk category of maize production, with low-ILUC-risk-produced maize amounting to 0.19 t ha−1 year −1.
Highlights
The method proposed here will be tested on the System Dynamics Indirect Land Use Change (SydILUC) model, a model developed directly for the STAR-ProBio project to deliver indirect land use change (ILUC) estimates and incorporate explicitly the additionality measures identified in previous stages of the project, and described in [51]
The ILUC risk tool proposed here is able to bridge the two main methods to deal with ILUC effects caused by biobased materials production: the modeling approach and the certification approach
The additionality practices identified as potential methods for a robust certification scheme for low-ILUC risk-biobased material production were explicitly included in a dedicated ILUC risk model
Summary
Biobased materials are increasingly taken into consideration as a way to achieve a circular economy, since they come from renewable resources [1]. Their environmental impacts should be carefully compared with their non-renewable counterparts [2]. The main discriminant in the comparison is land use change (LUC): the production of biofuels requires land dedicated to the cultivation of the source crops and, since most of the agricultural land. Indirect land use change has been defined first and foremost through economic modeling of scenarios for the increase in biofuel production [5,30]. The seminal models by Searchinger and Hertel [4,5] are examples of economic models; other economic models are FASOM
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