Towards a sustainable biomass strategy – Discussion paper

Jun 2007

The paper reviews the current knowledge on the use of biomass for non-food purposes, it discusses its environmental sustainability implication, and describes the needs for further research, thus enabling a more balanced policy approach. The life-cycle wide impacts of the use of biomass for energy and material purposes derived from either direct crop harvest or residuals indicate that biomass-based substitutes have a different, not always superior, environmental performance than comparable fossil-based products. Cascading use, i.e. when biomass is used for material products first, and energy content is recovered from the end-of-life products, tends to provide a higher environmental benefit than primary use as fuel. Due to limited global land resources, non-food biomass only substitutes for a certain share of non-renewables. If the demand for non-food biomass, especially fuel crops and its derivatives, continues to grow, this will inevitably lead to an expansion of the global cultivated land at the expense of natural ecosystem such as savannas and tropical rain forests. Whereas the current aspirations and incentives to increase the use of non-food biomass are intended to counteract climate change and environmental degradation, they are bound to a high risk of problem shifting and may even lead to a global deterioration of the environment.

By: Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy

 
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