Don’t Fly on Food: Why the U.K. Should Not Change its Rules for Jet Fuels

A UK mandate requires an increasing share of the nation’s jet fuel to be provided by so-called Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF), rising from 2% in 2025 to 22% by 2040. But a new proposal threatens to undermine the policy’s sustainability goals.

With its SAF Mandate, the UK became a leading international example by only allowing for biofuels made from residues and wastes (such as used cooking oil, agricultural residues and waste wood) and electro-fuels to count toward the target. However, under reported pressure from the biofuel industry and concerns about meeting the mandate’s goals, the U.K. Department for Transport published a call for evidence late last year on the possibility of using food and other non-edible crops to produce jet fuels.

Allowing crop-based aviation fuels to count towards the mandate’s targets would be deeply problematic for people and the planet. WRI analysis shows that meeting the 2040 target through crop-based biofuels would require between 1.4 million and 1.6 million hectares of land, just to meet 22% of expected jet fuel demand. Allowing crop-based biofuels could also exacerbate deforestation, threaten food security and, ironically, emit even more greenhouse gases than continued use of fossil fuels — the exact opposite of what the U.K.’s SAF Mandate is intended to do.

The U.K. government is expected to decide whether to introduce any change to its mandate by the end of this year. Here, we outline the many reasons why relaxing its feedstock eligibility rules would be a real step in the wrong direction.