Beschreibung:
The rapid expansion of biofuel production and consumption in response to global climate mitigation commitments and fuel security concerns has raised concerns over the social and environmental sustainability of biofuel feedstock production, processing and trade. The European Union has thus balanced the commitment to biofuels as one of the options for meeting its renewable energy targets for the transport sector with a set of sustainability criteria for economic operators supplying biofuels to its member states. Seven voluntary 'EU sustainability schemes' for biofuels were approved in July 2011 as a means to verify compliance. While mandated sustainability criteria of the EU Renewable Energy Directive (EU RED) have a strong environmental focus, a number of these voluntary schemes have social sustainability as a significant component of their requirements for achieving certification. As several of these voluntary schemes are incipient, thereby limiting evidence on their effectiveness in practice, we have undertaken a comparative analysis of the substantive content or 'scope' of these schemes and the likely procedural effectiveness of the same. Findings show that some schemes have considerable coverage of social sustainability concerns. At the same time, three factors are likely to undermine the achievement of social sustainability through these schemes and the EU sustainability policies lending credibility to them: poor coverage of some critical social sustainability components, the presence of schemes lacking any social sustainability requirements and gaps in procedural rules.