In Norway, the Parliament has voted in favour of excluding biofuels based on "high deforestation risk" feedstock from 2020. The decision is made as part of the Parliament’s adoption of the national budget for 2019 and effectively makes the country the first to ban the use of palm oil in biofuels.
Norway has a set of policies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from transport, including policy incentives to increase the use of biofuels – such as a volume blending mandate for road transport rising to 20 percent in 2020 and a road tax exemption for biofuel supplied above the volume blending mandate threshold.
In 2016, the Norwegian Environment Agency reclassified Palm Fatty Acid Distillate (PFAD) from ‘waste/residue’ to ‘by-product’ and thereby disqualified PFAD-derived biodiesel from receiving double counting incentives as of January 1, 2017 and in 2017, the Norwegian Parliament voted in favour of a ban on palm oil-based fuels in public procurement.
However, there has been an increase in the use of palm oil-derived biodiesel fuels despite these restrictions. According to Rainforest Foundation Norway, almost half of all biofuels consumed in Norway in 2017 was palm oil based – 317 million litres of biodiesel – around 10 percent of the total Norwegian diesel consumption.
The decision on December 3, 2018, is made as part of the Norwegian Parliament’s adoption of the national budget for 2019. The majority in the Parliament, including the ruling coalition, is “concerned that indirect land use effects from palm oil production lead to deforestation” and as such “believes that the use of palm oil should be limited as much as possible”.
According to the adoption text (p170, paragraph XIX), the Parliament requests that the government “formulate a comprehensive proposal for measures and taxes in the biofuels policy in order to exclude biofuels with high deforestation risk both within and outside the blending mandate. These framework conditions shall be put forward in conjunction with the national budget for 2020, and shall be introduced from 1 January 2020”.
The Norwegian parliament’s decision sets an important example to other countries and underlines the need for serious reform of the world’s palm oil industry, said Nils Hermann Ranum of Rainforest Foundation Norway.
In November, the European Union (EU) agreed to phase out the use of biofuels with high indirect land use change (ILUC) risk by 2030. Although not a member of the EU, Norway’s decision goes far beyond this, as the Norwegian parliament requests that the measures be effected from January 1, 2020.
