US researchers say that indirect land use numbers should fall 75% on new analysis

November 9, 2012 |

In Michigan, a research team led by Michigan State’s Bruce Dale, writing in the November 2012 issue of Biomass & Bioenergy, that they believe that a lifecycle analysis approach to ILUC requires replacing the nutritional functions of the crops grown on the land, not the crops themselves. This functional approach to ILUC reduces the calculated value of ILUC by 73%%.

Seungdo Kim, Bruce E. Dale and Rebecca G. Ong wrote that “Thus far, the totality of the projected iLUC effect has been assigned to biofuel production. In fact, multiple drivers of land use change exist and the resulting GHG releases should, in fairness, be allocated among these drivers”, and they focused attention on “how to allocate the environmental consequences of iLUC to “more usefully address Nutrition versus Biofuel issues,” instead of “food vs biofuels”.

Category: Policy

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