Beneficial land-use change in Europe: deployment scenarios for multifunctional riparian buffers and windbreaks

Abstract

The land sector needs to increase biomass production to meet multiple demands while reducing negative land use impacts and transitioning from being a source to being a sink of carbon. The new Common Agricultural Policy of the EU (CAP) steers towards a more needs-based, targeted approach to addressing multiple environmental and climatic objectives, in coherence with other EU policies. In relation to this, new schemes are developed to offer farmers direct payments to adapt practices beneficial for climate, water, soil, air and biodiversity. Multifunctional biomass production systems have potential to reduce environmental impacts from agriculture while maintaining or increasing biomass production for the bioeconomy across Europe. Here, we present the first attempt to model the deployment of two such systems, riparian buffers and windbreaks, across >81.000 landscapes in Europe (EU27 + UK), aiming to quantify the resulting ecosystem services and environmental benefits, considering three deployment scenarios with different incentives for implementation. We found that these multifunctional biomass production systems can reduce N emissions to water and soil loss by wind erosion, respectively, down to a “low” impact level all over Europe, while simultaneously providing substantial environmental co-benefits, using less than 1% of the area under annual crops in the EU. The GHG emissions savings of utilizing the biomass produced in these systems for replacing fossil alternatives, combined with the increases in soil organic carbon, correspond to 1-1,4% of total GHG emissions in EU28. The introduction of “eco-schemes” in the new CAP may resolve some of the main barriers to implementation of large-scale multifunctional biomass production systems. Increasing the knowledge of these opportunities among all EU member states, before designing and introducing country-specific Eco-scheme options in the new CAP, is critical.

Reed Canary Grass for Energy in Sweden: Yields, Land-Use Patterns, and Climatic Profile

“…Despite some studies suggesting its landscape dominance to have a negative effect on biodiversity for their invasive character [61], the typical cultivation in small areas separated by other land uses (with due planning and control) may indeed favour a mosaicbased land-use pattern, creating diverse niches for fauna and flora [62]. In addition, the strategic introduction of perennial crops into agricultural landscapes can, in general, result in multiple positive effects by supporting ecosystem services that can mitigate existing environmental impacts related to, e.g., soil and water, while supposing minor effects on food production [4,63,64]. For instance, the potential of RCG to mitigate GHG emissions from abandoned peat extraction areas has been shown [65].…”