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BioFuture members meeting


19 January 2017
10:00 - 07:00 hrs. IRENA headquarters
Abu Dhabi
, United Arab Emirates

The first working level members meeting of the BioFuture platform, which was launched in Marrakesh on the sidelines of COP22 ( http://biofutureplatform.org/ ) gathered representatives from India, Brazil, United States, Finland, Argentina, Sweden, France, Italy, Mozambique and Uruguay, who discussed upcoming activities, communications and next steps in promoting a positive agenda for advanced bioenergy and biomaterials. International organizations were also present, including the IEA, IRENA (acting as the host), UNCTAD and FAO (GBEP).

The countries attending endorsed the proposal of preparing a vision statement to provide a strong signal to the market about the relevance of accelerated action in the bioeconomy. The national focal points also discussed the preparation for an report from the platform, which shall examine the state of the low-carbon bioeconomy , to which all focal points would contribute via online country surveys and contributions from multilateral partner organizations. They also planned a series of focused policy conferences on topics such as demand-creation policies, internalization of environmental benefits, investment risk mitigation and accelerating R&D for the low carbon bioeconomy.

The meeting chair, Mr. Renato Godinho from Brazil, raised the importance of harmonizing messages to be issued in joint events between the member states and agencies, as a means to guide and consolidate messages which the platform wants to transmit, as a means to promote policy cohesion, market development and investor confidence.

One proposal was raised to benchmark commercial scale plants already operating, and based on sustainability indicators from FAO's GBEP.   Mr. Adnan Amin, head of IRENA, mentioned the unprecedented interest in renewable energy in last year, welcoming countries interest to harmonize their approach to bioenergy. Biomass representing more than 50% of the potential to double the amount of renewables by 2030, including its utilization in freight, aviation and shipping. This will be essential for the attainment of  SDG 7.  Integrated refineries producing a varied range of outputs such as biofuels, biomaterials and biochemical will be essential for the bioeconomy to grow and deliver on its potential, added IRENA in its remarks.

Irena's senior programme manager Mr. Jeffrey Skeer presented an IRENA report on the innovation outlook for advanced biofuels, stressing that technology maturity is not the only aspect important to the growth of the advanced biofuels market, but also the importance of conducive market-creation policies such as blending mandates for advanced biofuels, which already exist in the US and Italy and which is under consideration in Brazil.

IEA bioenergy, IRENA, FAO and UNCTAD offered their support and assistance to advancing the common goals of the common goals of the biofuture platform, in special through communications and contributions to the upcoming market study. The United States suggested using the same approach as the IEA uses when mapping statistics on plants and projects of 2g biofuels.

UNCTAD, through its Biofuels initiative which runs since 2005, stressed its interest to continue supporting the platform specially via discussions on trade dimensions of biofuels such as standards, trade tracking, and domestic domestic policies which impact international demand and innovation. Uruguay  - which is scheduled to chair the presidency of  IRENA in 2018 - has also shown interest to be involved in follow up activities.

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Contact

Henrique Pacini, UNCTAD. Henrique.Pacini@unctad.org