Sustainable biofuels are an important tool for the decarbonisation of transport. This is especially true in aviation, maritime, and heavy-duty sectors with limited short-term alternatives. Their use by conventional transport fleets requires few changes to the existing infrastructure and engines, and thus their integration can be smooth and relatively rapid. Provision of feedstock should comply with sustainability principles for (i) producing additional biomass without distorting food and feed markets and (ii) addressing challenges for ecosystem services, including biodiversity, and soil quality. This paper performs a meta-analysis of current research for low indirect land use change (ILUC) risk biomass crops for sustainable biofuels that benefited either from improved agricultural practices or from cultivation in unused, abandoned, or severely degraded land. Two categories of biomass crops are considered here: oil and lignocellulosic. The findings confirm that there are significant opportunities to cultivate these crops in European agro-ecological zones with sustainable agronomic practices both in farming land and in land with natural constraints (unused, abandoned, and degraded land). These could produce additional low environmental impact feedstocks for biofuels and deliver economic benefits to farmers.

Hungarian agriculture is expected to experience greater risks due to more variability in crop productivity due to increasing yearly average temperatures and extreme precipitation patterns. This study investigates the effect of changing climatic conditions on productivity, using a Hungarian sample of crop producers for a 12-year time period. Our empirical analysis employs True Fixed Effects frontier models of Farm Accountancy Data Network data that are merged with specific meteorological data representatively maintained for seeding, vegetative, and generative periods for cereals, oil seed and protein crops, along with soil quality and usage-related data. Estimations indicate that climate variables have significant impacts on technical efficiency. In addition, calculation suggest that an increase in temperature during seeding and vegetative periods, combined with higher precipitation levels in May and June, will reduce crop farmers’ production frontier. Estimations explain the variance, while the technical efficiency (TE) scores emphasize the impact of the difference in soil quality and its water absorption capacity.

Agricultural ecosystems deliver food, fibre, pharmaceuticals, bioenergy and are fundamental to human wellbeing. In Hungary main measures targeting the sustainable use of agricultural land in New Hungary Rural Development Programme (NHRDP) are: Agri-Environment Payments and payments to Less Favoured Areas. Based on theoretical assumptions, the delivery of different ecosystem services (e.g. soil fertility, pest control) may be typical of one product–product connection, but farms can deliver multiple services which by themselves are produced in non-separable packages. In this study we employ a transformation function with multiple outputs and inputs, representing the maximum output producing possibility from a given input and with given conditions using generalised linear regression. Given the limited options to implement the overall policy coherence of ecosystem conservation, the presented work contributes to knowledge of decisionmakers, whose need to take into account the heterogeneity of farms and corresponding ecosystem services on farm territory.