Multi-sector group to address implementation barriers for more sustainable biofuels
Participants at a jointly-hosted Shell-IUCN workshop identified alignment of policy and standards and information for land-use planning as areas to overcome implementation barriers to advance the sustainability of biofuel developments.
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/innoxiuss/442836237/
More than 30 participants gathered at IUCN’s headquarters in Gland, Switzerland on the May 2009. The workshop was held in the context of an ongoing partnership between Shell and IUCN to address key sustainability issues throughout the value chain of industrial biofuels. The workshop participants identified areas where a Shell-IUCN led consortium could readily and meaningfully overcome implementation barriers to advance sustainability issues.
Participants included representatives from biofuel suppliers (Shell), biofuel feedstock producers (ADM, Copersucar, Louis Dreyfus), voluntary schemes (Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels), sustainability certification (Pro Forest), NGOs (Wetlands International), and IUCN. This unique and diverse group identified a number of barriers to sustainability in the biofuel value chain and developed a set of ambitious action plans to pursue the following objectives:
1. Build collaboration and alignment between voluntary sustainability initiatives and with regulators developing sustainability criteria for biofuels.
2. Promote consistent and robust policy regimes for biofuels.
3. Better use of environmental data for decision-making processes for defining ‘go’ and ‘no go’ areas
4. Assessing and managing risks of sub-standard land-use planning processes
The group is now moving ahead with these action plans, which are summarized in more detail in the report from the workshop (Download Link). For further information on the workshop and this project please contact andrea.athanas@iucn.org.
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