Ethanol Producer Magazine | November 24, 2008 | Susanne Retka Schill

The groundwork is being laid to form an international body of scientists involved in bioenergy and biofuels to evaluate research being conducted around the world and help guide policy making efforts.

It would function much like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change whose comments on climate change are considered authoritative, partly because of the breadth and inclusiveness of the scientists involved in the process. “There is a clear need for an authoritative body that can comment on the longer term implications of bioenergy development,” said Luuk van der Wielen, leader of a Dutch delegation to a recent roundtable on biofuels.

The Nov. 15 roundtable was organized in Chicago by van der Wielen and Madhu Khanna, an agricultural economics professor at the University of Illinois-Urbana who leads a research program on the socio-economic impacts of biofuels at the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) at the University of California-Berkeley. The meeting was sponsored by B-Basic, EBI and the Consulate of the Kingdom of The Netherland. This was a follow-up to a meeting held earlier this year in San Francisco, van der Wielen said, where U.S. DOE and USDA officials suggested a need for the scientific community to organize globally to address the economic, environmental and land use impacts of bioenergy and to use science to inform biofuel policy.

Van der Wielen, who is director of B-Basic, said the group has agreed to facilitate the European involvement in the effort. B-Basic is a consortium of universities, research institutions and industries involved in bioenergy research that is comparable in scale to the EBI at the University of Illinois and the University of California-Berkeley. B-Basic is based at the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands.

The working name for the embryonic international organization is the Global Bioenergy Science Platform, van der Wielen said. About 30 people attended the Chicago meeting to discuss the project’s scope and the needed steps to form the group. Representatives from the EBI and DOE Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center attended the roundtable and are contacting other U.S. and global research entities. Van der Wielen said a number of follow-up discussions will be held in December around the United States. “We hope to have something finalized in January.” The intent is to be inclusive, he added, with individual scientists and small institutions joining the larger consortiums and research centers working not only in the United States and Europe, but also Brazil, China, Japan, India and elsewhere.

If the group follows the IPCC model, it will not conduct any research nor collect data, but rather assess the latest scientific, technical and socio-economic literature produced worldwide. The IPCC’s mandate states that its reports should be “neutral with respect to policy, although they need to deal objectively with policy relevant to scientific, technical and socio-economic factors. They should be of high scientific and technical standards, and aim to reflect a range of views, expertise and wide geographical coverage.”

To read the article on the original site click here.