Bioenergy comes with both benefits and risks: UN report

"The rapid growth of modern bioenergy worldwide presents many opportunities, but it also entails economic, environmental and social risks, according to a new UN report released Tuesday.
The report from UN-Energy, an inter-agency body established to coordinate the world body's work in the realm of energy, is entitled "Sustainable Energy: A Framework for Decision Makers" and was funded by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
The report underscores the many benefits that bioenergy provides in reducing poverty, improving access to energy and promoting rural development.
Bioenergy provides more choices for energy diversification and can help bring the oil market into balance and greatly reduce oil prices, it said.
Modern bioenergy can also help meet the needs of the 1.6 billion people worldwide who lack access to electricity in their homes, and the 2.4 billion who rely on straw, dung, and other traditional biomass fuels to meet their energy needs.
Bioenergy is produced from biofuels - solid fuels, biogas, liquid fuels such as bioethanol and biodiesel - which come from crops such as sugar cane and beet, maize and energy grass or from fuel wood, charcoal, agricultural wastes and by-products, forestry residues, livestock manure and others.
However, it warns that "unless new policies are enacted to protect threatened lands, secure socially acceptable land use, and steer bioenergy development in a sustainable direction overall, the environmental and social damage could in some cases outweigh the benefits."
The rapid growth of biofuel will raise agricultural commodity prices such as sugar, palm oil and soybean and could have negative economic and social effects, particularly on the poor who spend a large share of their income on food.
Rapid growth in liquid biofuel production will make substantial demands on the world's land and water resources at a time when demand for both food and forest products is also rising rapidly, it warned.
It noted that the prices of the world's two leading agricultural feedstock - maize and sugar - have already begun rising and soaring palm oil demand may be leading industrialists in Southeast Asia to clear tropical forests for new plantations.
On its implications for climate change, it pointed out that the ability of various bioenergy types to reduce greenhouse gas emissions varies widely, and where forests are cleared to make way for new energy crops, the emissions can be even higher than those from fossil fuels.
"Thus, the economic, environmental and social impacts of bioenergy development must be assessed carefully before deciding if and how rapidly to develop the industry and what technologies, policies, and investment strategies to pursue," it said."

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