Global Assessments and Guidelines for Sustainable Liquid Biofuel Production in Developing Countries: Final report

Abstract

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) aims to set clear policies and priorities for future work and investments in biofuel related projects and to provide guidance to countries on how to select sustainable biofuel projects. Three UN agencies, UNEP, UNIDO and FAO, in collaboration with three research institutions have worked together to prepare this report, with the aim to develop a Biofuels Screening Toolkit, that can be used by the GEF and/or other actors to address sustainability issues concerning biofuels. The research looked at environmental, economic and social impacts of biofuels with the overall objective of identifying and assessing sustainable systems in developing countries for the production of liquid biofuels for both transport and stationary applications. The research project was conducted in full awareness of other initiatives to develop sustainability criteria and policy tools for the promotion of sustainable biofuels, such as the UN Energy Decision Support Tool for Bioenergy (2011), the Global Bioenergy Partnership’s (GBEP) work on sustainability criteria and indicators, the European Union’s Directive on the promotion of the use of energy from renewable sources which contains sustainability criteria for biofuels (2009), and the Inter-American Development Banks’s Biofuels Sustainability Scorecard 2.0 (2009), as well as various certification schemes available on the market.