Biofuelwatch runs on a small budget and all funds go towards our UK and US educational and campaign work related to biofuels, biomass and biochar. Over the last three years, we have had grants from Andrew Wainwright Reform Trust, Artist Project Earth, Ashden Trust, Biomass Accountability Project, CS Fund/Wash-Mott Legacy, Lush Charity Pot, Network for Social Change, Polden-Puckham Charitable Foundation, The Funding Network and Wallace Global Fund. We are also grateful for smaller individual donations. Please see our donations page for details about how to support our work.
Biofuelwatch is the European Focal Point of the Global Forest Coalition.
Biofuelwatch policy
Policy aims and principles:
The Biofuelwatch aims and principles are to:
(a) Campaign against industrial bioenergy, i.e. energy linked to industrial agriculture and industrial forestry. This includes agrofuels, both current ones and ‘second generation’ ones.
Industrial agriculture, industrial logging and industrial tree plantations are major causes of greenhouse gas emissions and of the destruction of natural ecosystems and biodiversity, which are essential for regulating the climate. They also drive the destruction of sustainable agriculture, displacing small farmers, indigenous peoples, forest and other communities. They are inherently unsustainable and can never be part of the solution to climate change.
(b) Campaign in particular against the drivers of the demand for industrial bioenergy, i.e. against the policies which create an artificial market for agrofuels and other types of large-scale bioenergy and against the companies responsible for land-grabbing and land-conversion for industrial bioenergy.
(c) Support organisations and communities who are negatively affected by industrial bioenergy expansion, for example through sharing of information, media and publicity work and supporting relevant protest email actions.
The growing demand for agrofuels and, increasingly, other types of bioenergy, is accelerating the expansion of industrial monocultures worldwide.
(d) Actively support community groups and other local organisations campaigning against industrial bioenergy.
(e) Support campaigns for food sovereignty and biodiverse, small-scale agriculture, by Via Campesina and other groups.
Small-scale agro-ecological farming and agricultural policies that support food sovereignty are key to mitigating and increasing resilience to climate change.
(f) Raise awareness of the essential role which biodiversity and healthy ecosystems, including healthy soils, play in regulating the global climate, of the fact that the biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis are closely linked and cannot be addressed in isolation, and of the need for major reductions in overall consumption, including of energy and wood products particularly in the global North.
We further support the following principles:
- Support for major reductions in the demand for/use of energy, wood products, agricultural products (including livestock) etc. amongst those with high consumption and energy use.
- Support for genuine and socially just ecological restoration, including restoration of soils through agro-ecological practices/permaculture.
- Support for genuine renewable energy, which must be defined as excluding industrial bioenergy and other technologies which destroy biodiversity and ecosystems, such as large-scale hydro dams.
- A rejection of all policies which commodify nature, including carbon trading, trading in ‘ecosystem services’, market-based ‘REDD’ schemes and ‘biodiversity offsets’.
- A rejection of all attempts at ‘geo-engineering’, including bio-sequestration (such as biochar, ocean fertilisation, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage). Geo-engineering will put new major pressures on ecosystems and species and thus further undermine their ability to stabilise the climate.
- A rejection of all genetic engineering, whether of microbes, trees, crops or algae for reasons which include the potential for serious negative impacts on ecosystems.
