trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

LAND USE FOR BIOENERGY PRODUCTION –ASSESSING THE PRODUCTION POTENTIALS AND THEASSUMPTIONS OF EU BIOENERGY POLICYFrancesca Allievi and Jenny TurunenFinland Futures Research Centre, University of TurkuABSTRACT Global land use is becoming increasingly competitive because of population growth,economic growth and climate change mitigation actions. More agricultural land is required to producefood for the growing populations, and at the same time vast tracts of land are reserved for bioenergyproduction to fight climate change. Land is becoming a scarce resource and integrated land useplanning becomes increasingly important. However, the current EU bioenergy policy sets a high goalwhich is based on three key assumptions: by replacing fossil fuels with biofuels it’s possible to gainremarkable reductions in GHG emissions, increase energy security in the EU and spur ruraldevelopment both in the EU and in developing countries. Possible negative impacts of such a policy arealmost completely neglected. In this paper, bioenergy potentials estimations are reviewed, and thecritique to the EU bioenergy policy is presented; moreover, impacts on rural development anddeveloping countries are pointed out.1. IntroductionClimate change, global population growth and a rising energy demand are interlinked processes withconflicting dimensions. More agricultural land is needed to feed the increasing global population andsimultaneously economic growth increases the energy consumption of societies. At the same time,diminishing reserves of fossil fuel, requirements set forth from the climate change mitigation point ofview, and on-going debate on the use of nuclear power indicates a need for increasing amount ofrenewable energy. Bioenergy is often addressed as one of the main factors in the portfolio of solutionsproposed to fight climate change (McKendry, 2002).Bioenergy can be derived from various biomasses such as wood, grains, oil seeds, sugar cane, grassesand straw, human and animal manure, agricultural residues and food waste from food industry andhouseholds. Traditionally bioenergy has been exploited by burning wood or cow dung, and modernbioenergy production includes processing biomasses into liquid and gaseous fuels such as bioethanol,biodiesel or biogas. The liquid transportation fuels produced from biomass are usually called biofuels, indistinction from other types of bioenergy. In this paper we focus on bioenergy produced from cultivated230