Abstract

In October 2018, IEA Bioenergy Task 43 “Biomass Feedstocks for Energy Markets” and FAO organized a joint workshop “Sustainable Landscape Management for Bioenergy and the Bioeconomy”. The workshop’s leitmotiv was how to communicate bioenergy beyond the typical bioenergy stakeholders. Despite the effort of the scientific community and international organizations such as IEA Bioenergy, FAO and IRENA, bioenergy uptake is occurring at slower pace despite the sustainable biomass potential, economic feasibility and availability of mature technology. Bioenergy uptake is greatly influenced with social aspects of sustainability, both as dynamic performance of each bioenergy pathway along the social dimension of sustainable development (jobs, health, energy access, etc.) and perceptions in society on the general sustainability of bioenergy (encompassing the environmental, economic and social dimensions). Past failures of bioenergy policy to form positive synergies with agriculture, forestry and waste, e.g. biofuels from food and feed, tend to attract much more attention of the public than dominating good practice examples, backed up with scientific evidence. General knowledge of biomass issues among policy makers, the scientific community as well as civil society associations must be improved to enable a worldwide transition to a decarbonized society.  More than 30 bioenergy experts and scientists around the world from 14 bioenergy related entities gathered to express their views how to improve the communications. Some of the highlights are: “Bioenergy represents a major type of renewable energy. As such, it is key to supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the context of climate change and energy security. As summarized by the IPCC 5th Assessment Report, integrated assessment modelling indicates a high risk of failing to meet long-term climate targets without bioenergy. Global assessments by REN 21, IEA and IRENA find that bioenergy accounts for three-quarters of all renewable energy use today and half of the most cost-effective options for doubling renewable energy use by 2030. Bioenergy is part of a larger bioeconomy, including agriculture, forestry and manufacturing.” [1] “Bioenergy is multi-disciplinary in nature, so it is important to ensure that it is tackled in a multidisciplinary fashion that includes all perspectives. This workshop was a first step to approach bioenergy across institutions and disciplines, in a more cohesive way – we hope that working together we can move forward.” explained Olivier Dubois, the FAO Energy team leader. The workshop was an occasion to better understand one another’s skills and expertise for future collaboration. The results of the work in groups were translated in this report, with a feedback of an ecological sociologist on how to narrow the knowledge gap by inclusion of the epistemic community.

Published in

IEA BIOENERGY: Task 43
2019, number: 2019:7
Publisher: IEA Bioenergy

SLU Authors

• Dimitriou, Ioannis

  • University administration, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Bioenergy
Renewable Bioenergy Research


Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/107386