Environmental impacts of increased biomass demand for bio-based products in the bioeconomy

The transition to a bioeconomy aims to reduce dependence on finite fossil resources, mitigate climate change, and promote sustainable development. Forest biomass plays a key role in the bioeconomy, contributing significantly to bio-based materials and energy production. The transition to the bioeconomy implies the acceleration and upscaling of biomass production and use. However, increasing demand for forest biomass may drive substantial changes in land use and forest management, resulting in environmental impacts, such as, alterations in carbon balances.

Despite the growing emphasis on the bioeconomy, studies quantifying spatially and temporally explicit environmental impacts of increased forest biomass demand are limited. Existing assessments use aggregated and static models, which overlook spatiotemporal variations in land-use, land-management, and environmental outcomes. Addressing this gap is critical to quantify impacts of bio-based systems along value chains and to understand the trade-offs associated with increased woody biomass demand for bio-based products. Accounting for spatial and temporal variation of environmental impacts of the biobased economy requires an integrated modelling approach which includes economic modelling, land-use change and land management change simulation, environmental impact analysis, and approaches to allocate impacts outcomes to bio-based products.

This study aims to quantify the spatial and temporal variation in environmental impacts of bio-based products, driven by land-use and land-management changes resulting from increased forestry biomass feedstock demand in Europe up to 2050. By addressing impacts at both the land level and the bio-based product level, the study provides a comprehensive evaluation of the trade-offs associated with forest biomass sourcing, filling critical gaps in existing assessments. This research adopts an ex-ante and spatiotemporally explicit approach to assess these impacts, focusing on the impacts on carbon balances. More specifically, the approach consists of the following steps:

• Biomass-demand scenarios development using a partial equilibrium forestry economic model: Scenarios of biomass demand for bio-based materials, energy, and other applications. These scenarios, disaggregated by biomass types, form the basis for analysing future land-use changes and linking impacts to bio-based products.
• Spatio-temporal land-use change modelling with the partial equilibrium forestry economic model: Projections of land-use allocation across land use types (e.g., cropland, managed forests, and natural vegetation) while capturing competition among sectors.
• Carbon balance modelling with a forest resource allocation model: Simulation of the impacts of afforestation, deforestation, and forest management practices on carbon emissions and removals under alternative and standard forest management practices.
• Allocating biomass supply to demand with a spatially-explicit techno-economic model: Biomass-demand scenarios outputs are downscaled to a spatially-explicit techno-economic model for bio-based product-level allocation, allocating biomass supply to demand. This step helps making the link of environmental impacts to specific bio-based products.

The results offer an integrated framework to quantify spatial and temporal variations in environmental impacts of bio-based products. By focusing on product-level impacts and spatiotemporal variations, this research supports sustainable forest biomass sourcing strategies, identifies trade-offs, and informs evidence-based policymaking to align bioeconomic growth with long-term environmental sustainability goals.