The development of a sustainable biobased economy (BBE) in Europe is associated with several challenges. Amongst others, lessons learned from the development of the biofuel sector and the complex debate around land use change associated with a growing demand for biomass have to be considered when developing BBE policies. In that regard, strategies to identify and verify feedstocks with low potential risks for direct and indirect land use change (iLUC) impacts are of specific importance. Complementing existing efforts to assess iLUC with modelling activities, the European Commission (EC) has proposed a risk-based approach, aiming to differentiate high and low iLUC risk biomass. Amongst others, different additionality measures can be used to produce certified biomass with low iLUC risk. However, a comprehensive overview and analysis of these additionality measures and the challenges related to their integration in an integer verification approach is still missing. Therefore, we analyse European Union (EU) policies dealing with iLUC, iLUC risk assessment studies, certification approaches, and iLUC modelling studies to identify and develop additionality practices potentially applicable in certification and to show how the potential application of the proposed measures could be realised and verified in practice. We identified five potential practices for low iLUC risk biomass production, which are likely to be used by market actors. For each practice, we identified methods for the determination of low iLUC risk feedstock and products. Finally, our review includes recommendations for follow-up activities towards the actual implementation of additionality measures in biomass certification schemes.

Biobased materials may help to achieve a renewable, circular economy, but their impact could be similar to those of non-renewable materials. In the case of biofuels, the indirect land use change (ILUC) effects determine whether they can provide sustainability benefits compared to fossil fuels. ILUC modeling estimates have large uncertainties, making them difficult to include in a policy aiming at reducing environmental impacts. The Renewable Energy Directive (RED) II reduced ILUC estimate uncertainties by shifting the focus from ILUC environmental impacts to ILUC risk. Nevertheless, this does not take into account either certifiable additionality practices to reduce the ILUC risk for the production of biobased materials, or biobased materials other than biofuels. Here we propose a simple, user-friendly tool to bridge the gap between ILUC modeling and policy, by estimating the ILUC risk of biobased material production and to assess by how much different additionality practices can reduce that risk at different levels of the value chain. This was done by explicitly including the additionality practices in an ILUC model, simplifying the model to a spreadsheet tool that relates automatically the input provided by the user, which may be a producer or a policy maker, with a certain ILUC risk. We demonstrate the functioning of the tool on two examples: maize production in Iowa and in Romania. In Iowa, maize production is already very intensive, so the additionality practices proposed have little effect on its ILUC risk category, and the low-ILUC-risk-produced maize would amount to 0.03 t ha−1 year−1. In Romania there is ample margin for implementation of additionality practices, and thus a large potential to reduce the ILUC risk category of maize production, with low-ILUC-risk-produced maize amounting to 0.19 t ha−1 year −1.

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