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Biofuels and Indirect Land Use Change

This White Paper summarizes the issues surrounding indirect land use change (iLUC) and identifies ways to address weaknesses and areas of controversy in current approaches to modeling iLUC and potential iLUC mitigation options. It specifically identifies data requirements and potential collection methods that could improve modeling efforts and identifies potential ways to improve the assessment, quantification and verification of iLUC.
Section two of the paper discusses the concept of iLUC and Section three describes the challenges associated with attempting to estimate the magnitude of iLUC and the causality of changes solely attributed to biofuels. Section four provides an overview of the current approaches to modeling iLUC and describes some of the key areas of controversy in critiques of such approaches. Section five identifies potential improvements to iLUC assessment and quantification that could be used to a) improve modeling estimates for improved quantification of iLUC, b) improve knowledge of the relative contribution of biofuels to iLUC and c) better assess the relative risk of biofuels contributing to iLUC in geographic settings. Section six briefly discusses the opportunities and challenges associated with potential mitigation options and section seven sets out the steps needed to practically address iLUC.