Approaches to biofuels environmental and social sustainability standards in developing and underdeveloped countries

Despite early promise, the environmental and social sustainability of plant-based biofuels increasingly has come into question. Biofuels standards quickly are transforming at international, national, and state levels from merely carbon-consciousness to inclusion of environmental, social and economic criteria in the definition of sustainable. As European, U.S. and international biofuels standards emerge, policymakers must consider countries' ability to satisfy one-size-fits-all proscriptions. The danger going forward is that governments may impose sustainability regulations that are counterproductive to incentivizing biomass production and are of questionable cross-boundary enforceability. A solution may lie in the meta-standard regulatory approach, which benchmarks existing standards to a generic set of principles, criteria and indicators. Land-use exercises that designate food and fuel feedstock acreage also may be useful. In the end, however, capacity and infrastructure deficits pose challenging obstacles to sustainability standard implementation in developing and underdeveloped countries that otherwise possess great biomass production potential.