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Under international accounting rules significant emissions from bioenergy are not being accounted for, meaning that bioenergy is not fulfilling its potential as a climate mitigation tool and in some cases emits more carbon than fossil fuels. This briefing explores the reasons for this accounting failure and what must be done to resolve this issue.
Submitted by Anonymous on
Renewable energy is playing a starring role in new energy policies, but ECO fears that bioenergy may be seen as ‘carbon neutral’ under false pretences.
Many forms of bioenergy have a substantially unrecognised carbon footprint. Under existing IPCC guidance, GHG emissions from bioenergy are not accounted for in the energy sector. Rather, the guidance assumes that the emissions associated with bioenergy use in Annex 1 countries will be reflected in accounting in the LULUCF sector.
However, current LULUCF rules have ambushed this intention. While emissions from land-use change are accounted in the first commitment period of the KP, accounting for forest management and cropland management is voluntary. And it is the products of forest and cropland management that are burnt for bioenergy. As a result, these emissions are not necessarily accounted anywhere. Proposed accounting rules for forest management (in the second commitment period) could still allow Annex I parties to avoid accounting for the atmospheric impacts of forest-based bioenergy production and use, if Parties build pre-2010 bioenergy policies into their business-as-usual Reference Levels. There is no proposal to make accounting of cropland management mandatory.
Further, bioenergy sourced from non-Annex I countries and used in Annex I countries may escape capture in Annex I accounts.
The mistaken assumption that bioenergy is always ‘carbon neutral’ underlies a wide range of policies subsidising and otherwise favouring bioenergy. This is will catch up with us, and the planet.
It is time to bite the bullet and account for emissions from bioenergy in the sector of origin (the LULUCF sector) or in the end use sector (the energy sector). Ultimately, it may be necessary to account for different components of the carbon life cycle of bioenergy in different sectors, but the emissions must be included somewhere!
To find out more, saddle up and ride on in to the CAN side event 3:15 today in Tram.
Submitted by Anonymous on
Bioenergy had a starring role in this week’s workshop on developed country emission reduction targets. The theme of many parties was reducing energy sector emissions by substituting bioenergy for fossil fuels.
At last, Mexico sounded a note of caution in their presentation in the workshop on NAMAs, pointing out that reliance on biofuels is difficult to do sustainably, can be harmful in terms of conservation and REDD targets, and can impact on agriculture
Bioenergy - a clean alternative?
Bioenergy leaves a carbon footprint which is largely ignored when proposed as an alternative. This is an unacceptable situation as we face exponential growth in this energy source which is being justified in the name of addressing climate change.
The worry arising from tremendous expansion of bioenergy production from land and forests is not just the unintended consequences of constraining food supply and the potential to destroy biodiversity, as important as those are. There are also problems arising directly from the failure to address deficiencies of accounting rules in the KP.
ECO is compelled to point out that although the use of bioenergy is often claimed to be carbon neutral, this is rarely so. The emissions released from producing and burning bioenergy can be much larger than those for fossil fuels, especially when converted to liquid fuels or where grown on emissive peat soils, as shown in the chart.
Developed countries:
Actual emissions, fake accounting
Equally rare is accounting for the actual emissions. Yes, it’s that old problem – the LULUCF rules – once again!
Under existing IPCC guidance, bioenergy is accounted as carbon neutral when it is combusted in the energy sector, as it is a renewable energy source. But the crucial presumption underpinning this is that emissions associated with the provision of bioenergy have been accounted for in their sector of origin (i.e., the land use and forestry sector) in their country of origin and netted out against carbon sequestration in growing the bioenergy crop in the first place.
In developed countries this assumption founders on the failure of the LULUCF rules to mandate accounting for either forestry or cropland management. Currently, many parties choose not to do this. There isn’t even a proposal on the table that all parties must account for all LULUCF emissions including cropland management, in which case parties won’t include those activities in their reporting when they are emissive. In addition, the proposal for projected reference levels for forest management in the KP second commitment period opens a new kind of loophole, and this is a very concerning development also for accounting bioenergy emissions specifically.
