Transatlantic wood pellet trade demonstrates telecoupled benefits

Abstract

ABSTRACT. European demand for renewable energy resources has led to rapidly increasing transatlantic exports of wood pellets from the southeastern United States (SE US) since 2009. Disagreements have arisen over the global greenhouse gas reductions associated with replacing coal with wood, and groups on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean have raised concerns that increasing biomass exports might negatively affect SE US forests and the ecosystem services they provide. We use the telecoupling framework to test assertions that the intended benefits of the wood pellet trade for Europe might be offset by negative consequences in the SE US. Through a review of current literature and available data sets, we characterize the observed and potential changes in the environmental, social, and economic components of the sending and receiving regions to assess the overall sustainability of this renewable energy system. We conclude that the observed transatlantic wood pellet trade is an example of a mutually beneficial telecoupled system with the potential to provide environmental and socioeconomic benefits in both the SE US and Europe despite some negative effects on the coal industry. We recommend continued monitoring of this telecoupled system to quantify the environmental, social, and economic interactions and effects in the sending, receiving, and spillover systems over time so that evidence-based policy decisions can be made with regard to the sustainability of this renewable energy pathway.

Telecoupling: A new frontier for global sustainability

“…Across the special feature, the most common type of telecoupling studied was trade (examined in 11 of the 16 articles). Traded items varied widely from wood pellets (Parish et al 2018), metals (Xiong et al 2018), wildlife products (Carrasco et al 2017), food (Eakin et al 2017), and fishmeal (Carlson et al 2018) (Fig. 1).…”

“…Other studies treated sending and receiving systems as whole countries, for example via examining national level trade relationships (Xiong et al 2018). Spillover systems were diffuse, including specific third-party countries involved in trade deals (Carlson et al 2018, Xiong et al 2018 or those impacted by the non-target spread of greenhouse gases across boundaries (Parish et al 2018, Xiong et al 2018.…”

“…Diverse agents included farmers, fishermen, buyers, trade entities, governments, animals, tourists, NGOs, landowners, and international corporations. Parish et al (2018) proposed classifications of agents to help parse out their relative roles. These included "primary agents", "facilitating agents", and "constraining agents".…”

“…In other words, making gains toward sustainability in one place may occur at the expense of sustainability losses in other places or even at the expense of overall sustainability at the global scale. For instance, Europe has targeted the southeastern US as a source for wood pellets to meet alternative energy targets, in part because shipping over water is cheaper than shipping from a closer location within Europe (Parish et al 2018). This improves the efficiency of the market and helps forward the goals of meeting clean energy targets in European countries.…”

Perception of Environmental Spillovers across Scale in Climate Change Adaptation Planning: The Case of Small-Scale Farmers’ Irrigation Strategies, Kenya

“…In climate change adaptation, sustainability is oftenly framed as one way driver of change in the system of interest with little attention to feedbacks between the system of interest and other systems [7,19,77,78] ,as well as, poor cognition of spillover systems [33]. The cognitive barriers are linked to poor quality and/ or lack of specific information, poor coordination across scale [9], fragmented understanding among the actors [2,63], as well as, operational challenges among constrained agents [3].…”