It is important not to lose sight of the impact that climate change itself will have on biofuels into the future, together with determining the most appropriate place for biofuels in the long-term battle to reduce global GHG emissions. This section deals with these two issues.

4.2 Effects of Climate Change

It is uncertain whether existing current climatic conditions will prevail, with many scientists contending that anthropogenic climate change is already taking effect across the globe (Cook et al. 2013). There are a number of critical factors associ­ated with climate change that need to be taken into account. First, and as intro­duced above, there may be increased uncertainty with regard to rainfall patterns. This will problematize when to plant with annual crops (such as those used for first-generation biofuels), and will also place increased pressure on water use, with potential social repercussions outside the agricultural arena. Second, there may be increased and more severe meteorological phenomena, with floods wip­ing out entire fields, and storms damaging or destroying entire harvests (Charles et al. 2009). Uncontrolled fires resulting from drought, thunderstorm activity or human action could also have similar effects. Third, there may be an increased severity and incidence of pestilence, with changed climatic conditions making crops destined for biofuel production more susceptible to pest outbreaks (Malcolm et al. 2012). This would have the added environmental implication that there could potentially be an increased need to employ pesticides, herbicides or fungicides, with all the negative outcomes associated with the use of these materials signalled above compounded by increased chemical usage.

Taken together, these issues suggest that it will be more difficult to plan for weather — and climate-related phenomena into the future. Nations will clearly be unable to rely solely on domestic biomass cultivation for their biofuel needs (Larson 2008). It follows that increased energy security associated with biofuel production will need to be tempered with the understanding that existing agri­cultural techniques certainly do not guarantee constant and predictable harvests in the face of regular climatic uncertainty. Yet climate change, as is generally expected, will exacerbate this high level of uncertainty, regardless of whether it is anthropogenic or otherwise, or indeed a combination of both man-made and natu­ral processes. Regardless of these issues, it is essential that biofuel policy takes a path that does as much as possible to ensure that it assists with anthropogenic cli­mate change mitigation, rather than exacerbating the problem.