Next month the world’s spotlight will turn to Belém, a city on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, as Brazil hosts the COP30 climate summit. The setting is symbolic. The Amazon, “the lungs of the planet,” is a wealth of biodiversity and a colossal carbon sink, whose protection is critical in the fight against climate change.
However, a recent announcement from the Brazilian government risks undermining this spectacle. In collaboration with India, Italy and Japan, the host nation has launched an ambitious new pledge calling on world leaders to quadruple global sustainable fuel use by 2035. According to the International Energy Agency’s latest report, this fourfold increase involves more than doubling the global use of biofuels.
Let it be clear, Brazil’s commitment to speeding up the transport sector’s shift away from fossil fuels is commendable. But such a massive uptake in biofuels could have calamitous consequences for the environment and climate, depending on how this pledge is interpreted. To date, biofuels expansion has been disastrous, with vast amounts of land being cleared to make way for crops like oil palm, soy, sugarcane and corn. Recent T&E projections show that, under current growth trends and policies, 90% of biofuels will still be reliant on food and feed crops by 2030.
Hidden in the fine print, the IEA acknowledges that doubling biofuels should not invoke any increased land expansion for crop cultivation. Worryingly, this important caveat is nowhere to be seen in the pledge. Therein lies the problem. Such a broad, sweeping target overlooks the complexities and nuances that are critical to the debate around the sustainability of biofuels - and it’s a mistake we’ve seen before.
In 2009, the EU introduced new ambitious targets to ramp up biofuels use in transport, as part of the Renewable Energy Directive. A lack of consideration and policy safeguarding regarding the origin of the feedstocks resulted in a glut of palm oil flooding the European market and into our vehicles’ fuel tanks.
Palm oil quickly became one of the largest sources of biofuels in Europe, with its use in biofuels production exceeding four million tonnes at its peak, according to data from OilWorld. Brutal images of scoured earth, wildfires and displaced orangutans shocked the world, as tropical deforestation in SouthEast Asia ran rampant to keep up with the world’s demand for the multifunctional miracle oil.
The tragic irony? Because of this induced deforestation, the EU’s consumption of palm oil biofuels generated more than 300 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent between 2010-2019, triple what would have been emitted from the equivalent amount of fossil fuels.
After several years of campaigning from environmental groups, the EU eventually rectified the issue in 2019 by declaring that palm oil would no longer be eligible for biofuels by 2030. Several countries have already implemented this into national law. But ten years of damage had already been done, and the biofuels industry still had a thirst to quench.
Brazil’s latest endorsement of biofuels is by no means new. For decades the country has nurtured its biofuels industry, using its vast agricultural resources to become the world’s second-largest producer, behind only the United States. Its bioeconomy strategy earmarks biofuels as a key component of national economic growth, while its flagship biofuels policy, RenovaBio, has created an almighty appetite for crops like sugarcane, corn and soy. Much like palm oil, these crops can devour land, water and ecosystems at an alarming rate, while also putting pressure on food security, as biofuels grow as a competing end-use product.
Biofuels are an absurd solution…
Global biofuels production already occupies an area roughly the size of Italy, yet supplies just 4% of global transport energy. Doubling this supply of biofuels to satisfy the 4x sustainable fuel pledge risks incurring significantly more land expansion - land that could otherwise feed people, store carbon or support biodiversity.
At current production rates, when full supply chain and indirect land-use change impacts are included, biofuels already emit 16% more CO2 on average today than fossil fuels, with palm and soy-based biofuels among the worst CO2 contributors due to deforestation and peatland loss.
This is all-the-more concerning considering Brazil’s recent decision to lift the long-standing moratorium on soybean expansion, once credited with slowing Amazon deforestation. A stark reminder of how quickly climate policy can backslide when economic pressures mount.
What is most absurd is that it doesn’t have to be like this at all. Solar power, by comparison, can generate the same energy using just 3% of the land that biofuels require, on average. The contrast is stark: one pathway requires significantly less land, allowing more space to grow food and protect ecosystems; the other risks sacrificing both.
As host of COP30, Brazil has a rare chance to shape the global debate on land, energy and climate justice. Overturning the transport sector’s dependence on fossil fuels is of course crucial to climate change mitigation, and Brazil’s ambitions to find alternative fuel pathways as fast as possible has its merits. Yet this pledge risks becoming part of the problem it seeks to fix.
Should it not implement strict, feasible safeguards against land expansion, the 4x sustainable fuel pledge risks being remembered as a turning point towards another cycle of greenwashing and deforestation, much to the detriment of tropical forests, like the Amazon, and the global efforts to mitigate climate change.
