EWABA prepares position paper on feedstock certification

The EWABA association has highlighted the need to enable the deployment of cover and intermediate crops in Europe by ensuring the highest sustainability certification requirements.
Increasing decarbonisation targets, especially in the aviation and maritime sectors, will only be achieved with additional volumes of eligible feedstock.
As part of the European Commission’s ongoing preparatory work on certification rules for cover crops and intermediate crops, EWABA has prepared a Position Paper (PoP) to propose a number of measures that aim to ensure proper and adequate certification for these highly promising novel feedstocks.
The organisation believes that it is critical to set a sound and solid conditionality system for intermediate and cover crops in order to enable their wide deployment while ensuring that they meet the highest certification requirements.
In this context the industry at large needs specific guidance on how cover crops should be grown and harvested.
To ensure this, the Commission should create a map of global agricultural areas that allow multiple harvests per year and establish precise, unified certification rules.
Additional measures should include verifying biomass origin, setting appropriate audit sample sizes, enforcing penalties for non-compliance, while maintaining soil organic matter content for healthy crop production.