Is biofuel a solution to global warming or a concern for land use changes? Lessons from the EU energy policy and the international trade Laura Castellucci*,Giacomo Pallante*, Donatella Vignani** *Univ. Rome Tor Vergata **ISTAT

Since the publication of the first IPCC assessment Report in 1990, the importance of climate change has gained momentum. Climate change is the effect of the global warming, 90% of which is caused by increasing concentration of greenhouse and requires strong global cooperation to be mitigated

Energy and transportation sectors are the main emitters. When the possibility to substitute biofuel for gasoline, in the late ‘90s, the solution seemed to have been found. In 2010 the European Union was the largest biodiesel producer and in 2011 mandates for blending biofuel existed in many countries.

The European biofuel policy swings between raising and lowering mandate targets of biofuel in transportation according to the prevailing aim: either the reduction of energy dependence on imported fossil fuels or the reduction of emissions as climate change mitigation tool. unexpected and undesirable effects emerged: food price increases and land use changes.

Our aims was to empirically testing whether European biofuel strategy has caused imports of palm oil and of other food-based biofuels to increase. (In particular we aimed at evaluating the impact of palm oil EU demand on land use changes in terms of deforestation) We also aimed at investigating the impact of EU demand for biofuel sources on food price

Our concern was coming from the european energy policy: Europe has the lead in decabornization of the economy European Union is experiencing a low enthusiasm “Energy Union” recently launced by the Commission could galvanize the streghtening of the union

In the energy sector european energy seems to be clear (although less so very recently after the appearance of unconventional oils and the coming back of coal) The main problems are now coming from the transportation sector This is why biofuels could have been a solution

The difficulties we found both in assessing the impact on land use change and on food prices have proved to be greater than we thought The same was true for singling out on trade flows data the impact of the EU demand It is a fact that the european community has lowered the ceiling of biofuels to 7% from the 10% at least on a precautionary principle

While our aim is still there our paper is not