Monitoring the bio-economy: Assessing local and global biomass flows, land-use change, carbon impacts and future land resources

As one of the common goals of developing the ‘bio-economy (BE)’ is to reduce GHG emissions from fossil feedstocks, it is crucial to monitor the associated carbon stock change from land-use change (CSC-LUC). This thesis addressed the key knowledge gaps related to (i) tracking the biomass flows for the BE, (ii) measuring the impacts of additional demand on CSC-LUC, and (iii) assessing land availability for future biomass production.
Firstly, taking the Netherlands as an example, the thesis showed that existing monitoring efforts can be combined to draw a more complete picture of the biomass flows for the BE, despite the need to overcome several methodological challenges e.g. inconsistency in data definitions. This clarified the consumption patterns in different end-markets in conjunction with the trends in cross-border trade.
As the flows are complex, linking the additional demand from the expanding BE to global CSC-LUC can be complicated. By analysing 12 existing studies, the thesis found that using quantitative results from a single study for accounting purposes in policymaking can be misleading since the context can be very different. Instead, the relative roles of different drivers (e.g. logging vs oil palm) in local, regional and global perspectives, should be further examined.
The thesis then demonstrated how a small change in the methodological setting will affect the quantitative results by developing a method to allocate historical CSC-LUC to agricultural expansions. Three key trends were found for 1995-2010: (i) agricultural land degradation and abandonment was found to be a major (albeit indirect) driver for CSC-LUC, (ii) CSC-LUC was spurred by the growth of cross-border trade, (iii) non-food use (excluding liquid biofuels) has emerged as a significant contributor of CSC-LUC in the 2000’s.
These results show that improving land management and productivity with efficient use of under-utilised low carbon (ULC) land offers opportunities to close the demand gap while reducing the CSC-LUC impacts. Taking regencies in Kalimantan (Indonesia) as case studies, the thesis explored ULC land resources by analysing information from different monitoring domains such as land cover and land occupancy. It was found that to avoid over- or under-estimation, all information from these domains should be analysed together, supported with relevant literature and evidence from interviews.
However, physical estimates cannot provide a complete picture of ‘real’ land availability without considering a broader range of socio-economic factors (e.g. labour availability). The thesis thus further studied the cases by addressing the factors from the different perspectives of various actors. It was concluded that mobilisation of ULC land, instead of focusing only on one crop or end-market, has to depart from analysing the specific conditions within individual regencies, especially considering the views of multiple land-use actors on different land-use options and business models.
Conclusively, measuring the impacts of the expanding BE on both the consumption and production side is important, especially considering the different local context, to understand how the development of the BE can be done in a sustainable way. Questions on ‘how’ and ‘why’ are equally important to ‘what’ and ‘when’ for tailoring strategies to improve productivity for meeting additional demand from BE without compromising the environmental and socio-economic sustainability.