More openness needed about scientific data

Biofuel is causing major problems for the Commission.

Biofuel was once seen as the ‘green gold’ answer to climate change, but increasingly it is a problem policy for the European Union. Not only because certain types of biofuel may cause more environmental problems than they solve, but also because they have not cast a favourable light on the EU’s policymaking machine.

The history of the EU’s biofuel policy is one in which ambition has run ahead of the evidence.

The EU’s leaders decided at a summit three years ago that the Union should get 10% of transport fuel from biofuel by 2020, as long as it came from sustainable sources. This ‘sustainability’ caveat was a necessary catch in the weave, but it has gradually led to a slow unravelling of the policy.

By the time the EU got around to agreeing the renewable energy directive in 2008, the stand-alone biofuel target had mutated into a goal to get 10% of EU transport fuel from renewable sources. A study published last week shows how far the Commission’s thinking has moved on – an internal study from the trade department assumes that biofuel will have only a 5.6% share of road transport fuel by 2020.

The reduction in ambition comes from two concerns. First, that growing crops for fuel might compete with food production, although the evidence is mixed. Second, that policymakers neglected to count the indirect effects of biofuel on how land is used. Here, the evidence is still emerging, but suggests that biofuel cultivation has a domino effect. Expanding biofuel production in one area could lead farmers to plough up forests or grassland to grow food in another. What is known by academics as indirect land-use change has caused problems in the Commission.

The Commission has three more studies on indirect land-use change still to publish, so the study from the trade department is not the final word, but it has something useful to say about the relationship between biofuel crops and land-use patterns.

That the Commission is starting to publish its work is a welcome step. To date it has not been transparent enough. It has failed to respond to MEPs’ questions about its work on indirect land-use change, allowing deadlines to lapse. It has also delayed publication of critical reports on biofuel, including a study by its own research unit in 2007-08. More recently, one independent contractor was so unhappy with how the Commission represented its work that it drafted a footnote disclaiming the conclusions on biofuel. One Commission department has argued against publishing critical studies, because they give ammunition to critics of biofuel.

A number of green campaign groups have begun legal action against the Commission for not providing documents about biofuel policy in line with a legal deadline on freedom of information. The Commission acknowledges that it has not met some deadlines, but says it is struggling to collate all the information.

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It is hard to escape the impression that the Commission can be its own worst enemy. By ignoring Parliamentary questions, it has given the impression that it does not want to have an open debate about biofuel.

Commission officials face genuinely difficult problems, with evidence emerging after the policy has been set. But a reluctance to be fully open will damage the policy and the Commission’s reputation. For some groups, biofuel will always be the wrong answer, just as genetically modified crops or the Common Agricultural Policy will always have enemies. But as climate- change scientists have found out, public trust is lost when evidence and data are hoarded like a weapon.

The experience reinforces the case for the Commission to have its own chief scientific adviser, an idea proposed by European Commission President José Manuel Barroso last year and endorsed by the college of commissioners last month. An independent scientific adviser will not be a panacea for better climate policies or transparency, but promoting a more open culture in the use of scientific and policy evidence would help both those causes.