Sustainability Issues in Biomass Feedstock Production: A Policy Perspective - Engineering and Science of Biomass Feedstock Production and Provision - page 247

The GBEP, too, has developed international guidance for land management to
avoid competition between food and energy biomass cropping. Its indicators include
assessment of several potential LUC impacts, including the extension of agriculture
onto currently unused land [ 123 ]. Signifi cantly, the GBEP recommends countries
consider environmental, social, and economic impacts when evaluating land uses
(including how to exploit unused lands such as degraded or contaminated land), and
the particular benefi t when this is done as part of a national assessment on the suit-
ability of land for biomass cropping such as that conducted by the Brazilian ZAE-
CANA [ 123 ]. The GBEP recognizes that such an assessment is most effective when
coupled with a comparison to the land-use effects of other energy options such as
coal and oil [ 123 ].
Assuming this policy course, signifi cant obstacles remain to implementation.
Preference for MIDA lands cropping in policy discussions to address the food and
GHG dilemmas has not transformed into defi nitions in bioenergy statutes. One
likely reason is that MIDA lands defi nitions are diffi cult to design. Economic mod-
els do use defi ned marginal land assumptions to determine carbon footprinting, but
“economic marginality” for purposes of modeling does not translate easily into
enforceable legal land defi nitions and ignores other environmental and social char-
acteristics of marginal lands. Some methods do exist for balancing environmental
and socioeconomic characteristics of land within countries' subsidy and taxation
policies, but questions remain regarding both their methods of measuring the com-
plexity of interactions and the absence of biomass-to-bioenergy cropping systems in
factor analysis. This is particularly acute when ecosystems span various landscapes
and where ecosystem services must be accurately assessed and valued. These meth-
ods, too, lack tools for farmers to make valid marginality or degraded assessments.

9.5 Summary

Few have questioned whether it is reasonable for policymakers to expect bioenergy
statutes to shoulder balancing of food, energy, and environmental needs that are
mediated through an international market system. As demonstrated in this chapter,
bioenergy policies, to varying degrees, incorporate concrete sustainability expecta-
tions for biomass feedstocks. In the United States, California's LCFS is the furthest
along in developing environmental and social metrics. Federal procurement in the
near feature likely, too, will apply sustainability metrics to biobased fuels and prod-
ucts. Sustainability regimes have not been applied on a widespread basis to agricul-
tural landscapes in the United States, however; thus, challenges lie ahead in
developing tools and practices for farmers to deploy. The decisions made in this
regard will most certainly impact all the feedstock production tasks previously dis-
cussed in this topic and may make one or the other approaches described here more
or less sustainable. While sustainability has been much more of a focus in forests,
the prospect of increased demand for forest biomass for energy because of various
government mandates most certainly will be much more highly controversial
because of the ecosystem values inherent in forests. The EU has had sustainability