Economic Impacts and Land Use Change from Increasing Demand for Forest Products in the European Bioeconomy: A General Equilibrium Based Sensitivity Analysis

Abstract

The European forestry sector is a potential driver of transformation towards a sustainable bioeconomy. Forest products are increasingly used in high-tech and high-value-added industries, e.g., chemicals and the automotive industry. So far, however, research on the European bioeconomy has largely focused on agriculture as a provider of food, feed, fuel, and fiber to bio-based industries. Here we assess the potential impacts of a stronger reliance on forestry sector inputs to the European Union (EU28) bioeconomy on output, prices, final demand, and land use. Specifically, we run a sensitivity analysis of a 1% increase of input use of forest products in the EU28 economy in a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) framework accounting for land use by Agro-Ecological Zones (AEZ) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at high regional and sectoral resolution. We find that such a shift to a more forest-based bioeconomy would provoke small indirect land use effects globally due to existing international trade linkages and land market effects. Simulated increases in planted forest cover are associated with net GHG emission savings, but our scenario analysis also points to higher imports of forest products from countries with vulnerable tropical forest biomes, such as Brazil and Indonesia.

Análisis metodológico de los estudios prospectivos que exploran el futuro de la bioeconomía

“…Enfoque metodológico de los documentos prospectivos. A [Börjesson, H. et al (2016); Haddad, S. et al (2019); Philippidis, G., et al (2019)] B [Bartolini, F. et al (2015); Tsiropoulos, I., et al (2017)] C [Jonsson, R. et al (2016); Lundholm, A. et al (2019)] D [Choi, H. S. et al (2019); Peñaloza, D. et al ( 2018 Fuente: Elaboración propia con base en artículos de Scopus (2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019).…”

Biomass, Bioenergy and Biomaterials

“…A key debate about using woody biomass as feedstock for bioenergyespecially with regard to the shift from fossil fuel energy to woodfuel -relates to equity of access to energy resources; wealthy nations are adopting the use of woody biomass for large-scale electricity generation and heating as a replacement for fossil fuels (Haddad et al 2019). FTA researchers have explored the up-scaling of electricity production from woody biomass (Ackom et al 2013;Pirard et al 2017a), which is seen by the global development agenda as an integral part of the shift towards a forest-based bioeconomy.…”

“…The International Energy Agency's 2021 report Net Zero by 2050 (IEA 2021) outlines a strategy to achieve net zero in cooking energy by entirely phasing out traditional biomass (woodfuels) by 2030, replacing them primarily with modern bioenergy and electricity. This is unlikely to occur, especially since woodfuel is a main source of energy for 40% of the world's population (Sola et al 2016); in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the demand for wood-based biofuels by rural and urban users is expected to remain steady in the near future (Haddad et al 2019).…”

Sustainability implications of transformation pathways for the bioeconomy

“…A growing literature focuses on measuring or assessing sustainability implications of bioeconomic change ( Escobar et al, 2018 ;Haddad et al, 2019 ;Nong et al, 2020 ;Robert et al, 2020 ). Given that bioeconomy strategies in the United States and EU initially focused on the energy sector, much of the early contributions to this literature looked at policies and technological solutions for bioenergy-based transformation processes, as well as their drivers and outcomes ( Söderberg and Eckerberg, 2013 ;Popp et al, 2014a ).…”