On October 17, the member states of the International Maritime Organization decided to postpone the decision on adopting a new framework to cut international shipping emissions until 2026. But one year of delay does not erase shipping's ultimate goal — decarbonization by 2050, as stipulated under the pre-existing 2023 IMO Revised Strategy. To reach this, many potential pathways are under consideration, including harmful biofuels.

Recent concerns about sustainability and land use have encouraged governments and businesses to promote policies incentivizing so-called “waste” or “residue” feedstocks for biofuels, such as used cooking oil. The idea behind these policies is to ease pressure on natural ecosystems and agricultural land, and to create a more circular economy where products are reused rather than discarded. However, like the biofuels boom more broadly, there have been unintended consequences.

Biofuels are often praised for their supposed carbon savings. Since many are derived from plants, the logic goes that the carbon they sequester while growing offsets the carbon released when they burn. Yet this is the first and most important thing to understand about biofuels: When combusted, they still emit carbon dioxide. 

That might be acceptable if their cultivation really did pull an equivalent amount of carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the soil. But this process is not permanent — crops are harvested and burned — and often the cultivation of biofuels actually reduces the amount of carbon a given landscape can store.

The establishment of biofuel plantations often takes place on formerly biodiverse, intact rainforest or peat wetland in South America or Southeast Asia. The destruction of these healthy ecosystems releases huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, as well as displacing wildlife. These lands are also home to Indigenous or traditional farming communities, who often face violent eviction or persecution at the hands of the state or big business, exposure to toxic agrichemicals, loss of food security, and the erosion of culturally important practices tied to these ecosystems. 

Even when new soy or palm plantations are established on land that is already used for agriculture, this often displaces food crops and cattle ranching onto more marginal or uncultivated land, a process known as indirect land use change (ILUC). The result is shrinking wild habitats, accelerating deforestation, and rising food insecurity as prime farmland is diverted from dietary staples.  

Industrial biofuel farms are also monocultures, covered in soil-depleting fertilizers and carcinogenic pesticides, and so provide little to no habitat while reducing the land’s natural ability to hold in CO₂. They are also more vulnerable to severe forest fires.

These damaging impacts are what have led to the surge in demand for waste- and residue-based fuels. These are also often cheaper than pure vegetable oils. Common feedstocks such as used cooking oil or palm oil mill effluent can be made chemically identical to virgin vegetable oil, and several whistleblowers have revealed how sloppy auditing and overt fraud are widespread in sustainability certification processes that are entirely captured by industry-led bodies. This means  that consumers cannot be confident that their biofuels are not directly fueling the destruction of natural ecosystems, the release of huge carbon bombs, and the dispossession of local communities. This is all without even touching on the occupational hazards and poor conditions suffered by workers in biorefineries.

Many campaigners tout electrofuels or "e-fuels" as potential alternatives, but they are very early in development, with no guarantee of ever becoming commercially (or environmentally) viable.

Yet, shipping presents an ongoing challenge. As biofuels are cheap and largely available, they will be the go-to solution of the industry, with the threat of unleashing an environmental disaster. That’s why members of my organization gathered outside the IMO headquarters in London during the negotiations, seeking to persuade delegates that biofuels cannot be part of shipping’s green transition. 

Wind-assisted propulsion is doubtless a crucial tool in cutting both emissions and general energy usage over long distances at sea. But to fully address the problem of shipping’s enormous carbon footprint, policy must go beyond techno-fixes to encompass the unspoken truth at the heart of this debate — that demand reduction is required to bring shipping in line with necessary decarbonization targets. There simply have to be fewer container ships, making fewer, shorter journeys, and carrying less freight. 

We may have to wait a year to find out. But whether shipping charts a bold course to shores unknown, or relies on tired industry-led false solutions designed to maintain the status quo, is yet to be decided. Governments now have an historic opportunity to steer the shipping sector toward truly clean solutions that protect people and the planet. 

Pax Butchart is biofuels campaigner at Biofuelwatch.