Over 100 civil society organisations, including Friends of the Earth Europe, wrote to the European Commission calling for the full climate impact of agrofuels, including indirect land use change, to be taken into account in two key pieces of EU legislation. The full letter can be downloaded on the right.
We told the European Commission that Europe’s use of biofuels to fuel its vehicles risks driving land grabs and deforestation, increasing food prices, exacerbating poverty and hunger, and accelerating climate change, and that it needs to take action to ensure Europe’s green transport policy discourages those biofuels that cause higher greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels.
Land that would otherwise be used to feed people and livestock now satisfies the EU’s growing hunger for biofuels. New lands must be ploughed up elsewhere for food and feed, destroying vital ecosystems and carbon stores like forests and peat land, a process that releases millions of tons of emissions and accelerates climate change. This reality undermines the environmental benefits that EU biofuels policy promises.
The Commission is about to decide on its legislative proposal on how to deal with this issue. We called on the European Commission to introduce a proposal for feedstock-specific ILUC emission factors when calculating carbon footprints in both the Renewable Energy and Fuel Quality Directives.
