BRUSSELS, July 6 (Reuters) - Europe's thirst for biofuels could have global repercussions, encouraging farmers to carve an area the size of Denmark out of wilderness and abandoned farmland, a European Union research report shows.
An area of 4.5 million hectares could be affected, according to an average of 15 computer modelling exercises in the EU report, made public after Reuters invoked freedom of information laws. The worst-case scenario could be four times worse.
If the extra farmland was gained by clearing wild land, it could result in a one-off release of at least 200 million tonnes of carbon — about the same as the annual fossil-fuel emissions of Germany.
The report, by a research centre in Ispra in Italy, is the EU’s most wide-ranging attempt yet to understand the complex interactions between biofuels, agriculture and climate change.
European Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger has set some basic standards for biofuels sustainability and promised to act on any new evidence of a negative impact from changes in land use.
"If it is confirmed that indeed that there is a serious problem related to indirect land use, we may adapt our legislation," he said in response to a Reuters investigation that showed growing evidence against the fuels.
The bloc is trying to understand the negative impact of plans to obtain about 7 percent of its transport fuels from biofuels by 2020, a move that could open up a market worth $17 billion a year.
Farmers in Europe are looking into this opportunity, as are producers in Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia.
But a new scientific perspective, known as "indirect land use change", casts doubts on biofuels’ green credentials and could undermine their future in Europe, which wants to use them as an alternative to high-carbon fossil fuels.
NEW FIGURES
The basic assumption about biofuels is that plants absorb as much carbon dioxide when growing as they release when burned in an engine — so their net impact on the climate is zero, except for emissions from farming machinery.
But critics say that is a gross over-simplification. According to the new concept, the reality is much more complex.
Put simply, if you take a field of grain and switch the crop to biofuel, somebody will go hungry unless those missing tonnes of wheat are grown elsewhere or farming yields are improved.
The grain to make up the shortfall could come from anywhere — often encouraging farmers to hack out new land from fertile tropical forests.
Burning forests to clear that land can pump vast quantities of climate-warming emissions into the atmosphere, enough to cancel out any of the benefits the biofuels were meant to bring.
To produce biodiesel equal to a million tonnes of oil, the EU would create an indirect impact equal to 341,600 hectares of land. For bioethanol, the impact is 386,400 hectares.
Figures produced by the EU executive, the European Commission, show the bloc’s biofuels strategy implies an increase in consumption for biodiesel of 6.3 million tonnes of oil equivalent (Mtoe) between now and 2020 and for bioethanol of 6.08 Mtoe.
Combining the figures shows that the biofuels strategy will lead to an indirect impact of 2.15 million hectares from biodiesel, and of 2.35 million hectares from bioethanol.
That would mean that the average of all 15 modelling attempts by the Commission implies the EU biofuels strategy will cause a land use change impact of 4.5 million hectares of land in 2020. All figures used in those calculations are at the conservative end of the range.
