Will Brazil’s push for low-carbon biofuels contribute to achieving the SDGs?


March 29, 2022.  

Will Brazil’s push for low-carbon biofuels contribute to achieving the SDGs?

Seven years have passed since all UN members agreed in September of 2015 to implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) until 2030. Now we are approaching the final half of this agenda timeline, and what have countries done so far?

Brazil, as one of the world’s leaders of the bioenergy market, launched a new national policy Renovabio in 2020. It is a carbon credit trading program with additional sustainability standards which would support the Climate Agenda and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Despite the generally high expectations of the policy, experts agree that this policy will impact the SDGs positive and negative with regard to different categories. Those findings are described in detail at a recent paper published in the journal Cleaner Environmental Systems.

The study assessed the potential impacts of Renovabio Policy on the SDGs targets, from the experts’ perspective, the level of agreement and potential bias between the groups of interests. In summary, there was a consensus among the respondents that Renovabio will contribute to clean energy and climate change mitigation goals by promoting efficient technologies and agricultural practices. At the same time, they anticipated mixed and partly negative effects on water quality, biodiversity loss and waste related targets. Still, Renovabio is likely to support more than half of the biofuel SDG targets, according to them. This positive expectation pattern was, however, influenced by various sources of bias, such as i) “hype cycle” dynamics, ii) knowledge gaps, iii) uncertainty due to complex interactions, and iv) science system priorities. The relatively high confidence in the positive impacts of a new policy must be vouched by concrete complementary initiatives, in a way that the SDG goals are not cherry-picked or assigned a hierarchical order.

The article is the result of doctoral research by Fernanda Martinelli, the main author, within the project “Sustainable Trade & Innovation Transfer in the Bioeconomy” (funded by BMUF), coordinated by Prof. Dr. Jan Börner, from the Center for Development.

Diese Webseite verwendet Cookies

Diese Website verwendet Cookies – nähere Informationen dazu und zu Ihren Rechten als Benutzer finden Sie in unserer Datenschutzerklärung am Ende der Seite. Klicken Sie auf „Ich stimme zu“, um Cookies zu akzeptieren und direkt unsere Website besuchen zu können.
Read more