Swedish researcher says EU biofuel regulations don’t guarantee sustainability

May 30, 2018 |

In Sweden, EU biofuel regulation does not guarantee a reduced climate impact – nor does it address the core issue of substantially reducing transport emissions, according to a new doctoral thesis from Lund University in Sweden.

“On a smaller scale, biofuels can be a good alternative for public transport, but we cannot solve the climate issue by simply replacing fossil fuels with biofuels. Instead, we must reduce our energy consumption, as the total energy consumption within road transports is not decreasing”, explains David Harnesk, researcher at the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies.

In his thesis, David Harnesk studied the effects of the EU’s biofuel regulation, specifically the Renewable Energy Directive from 2009, investigating how well the directive meets its goals of reducing the climate impact from the transport sector and promoting rural development. The directive introduces a regulatory framework to ensure that, by 2020, the share of energy from renewable sources will correspond to 10% of the transport sector’s energy consumption.

The study argues that EU biofuel regulation is neither environmentally sustainable nor socially beneficial in the long term. Essentially, it benefits the EU market, without taking into account the directive’s impacts outside the region. He suggests that, in part, the directive and its predecessors were drafted in an effort to support the energy and agriculture sector in Europe, which was experiencing an economic crisis at the time.

Category: Research

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