Bog Versus Biofuel
Wetland restoration in Europe could hinge on farm & energy policies
Could our growing thirst for biofuels swamp efforts to restore Europe’s wetlands? Not necessarily, finds a complex new analysis of how conservation, energy and farm policies can collide. But exactly how policymakers set the rules may make a big difference to the cost and effectiveness of efforts to protect and expand mires, marshes and bogs.
Like many regions, the 27 nations of the European Union (EU) are juggling sometimes competing efforts to produce cheap food, find renewable alternatives to fossil fuels and preserve biodiversity. By 2020, for instance, the EU wants at least 10% of its total fuel to come from plant-based biofuels, and at least 21% of its electricity to come from renewable sources, including burning “biomass” such as wood chips. Such policies have helped spark big efforts to create biomass energy plantations and plant energy crops, potentially creating pressure to convert farm fields and wildlands. Meanwhile, EU policymakers also want to protect biodiversity – which in some cases means trying to restore the estimated 70% of European wetlands destroyed over the last century.
To see how the EU’s growing demand for energy crops might affect wetlands, Christine Schleupner and Uwe A. Schneider of Hamburg University in Germany constructed a series of scenarios using different economic and policy assumptions. Overall, they report in a paper published online on 23 August by Environmental Science & Policy, the 27 nations have about 90 million hectares of existing and potentially restorable wetlands. In general, they found that policies that encouraged biofuels development increased competition for land and drove up prices, potentially making restoration projects more expensive. Meanwhile, policies that encouraged wetland restoration in Europe tended to create an incentive for “intensification” of land use outside of Europe, as foreign farmers and loggers ramped up efforts to export food and fuel to the continent. “A transfer of environmental stresses takes place,” the authors note.
The devil, however, is in the details, the scenarios suggest. If, for instance, policymakers allow up to 90% of Europe’s forests to be converted to other land uses, the demand for biomass has a relatively minor impact on wetland restoration. If just 10% of the forests can become energy plantations, however, the relative cost of wetland restoration increases “substantially.” Policy choices also influence how wetlands fare in different parts of Europe, with northern bogs benefiting under some scenarios, but southern swamps under others. Different scenarios also have varying impacts on food prices, another key concern of policymakers.
Although even their complex model has many gaps, Schleupner and Schneider say it provides insight into “the complex interactions between different societal objectives,” and they hope it will help “policymakers to find the socially optimal balance between alternative land uses by integrating environmental benefits, economic opportunities, and energy security concerns.” One bottom line, they say, is that “ambitious bioenergy policies should be carefully reviewed regarding their impacts on ecosystems and food security.” What’s needed, they add, are even better tools for figuring out if a bottle of biofuel is really worth more than a meter of marsh. – David Malakoff
Source: Schleupner, C., & Schneider, U. (2010). Effects of bioenergy policies and targets on European wetland restoration options. Environmental Science & Policy DOI: 10.1016/j.envsci.2010.07.005
Image © Sven Grüne | Dreamstime.com
