In a context of growing competition between land uses within and outside of Europe, bioenergy development is often seen as one of the possible contributors to such competition. However, in the EU there are portions of land which are not used or cannot be used for productive activities. This is the case of contaminated land or land unsuitable for the production of food or feed, set-aside lands and fallow lands. Bioenergy crops have the potential to be grown profitably on these lands and can therefore offer a source of income to local populations while contributing to achieving the targets of the Renewable Energy Directive (EC/2009). This is the case of contaminated sites in Italy and Germany, where industrial and mining activities have affected the quality of the soils in specific areas and have impacted the possibility to carry out traditional agriculture. As a consequence, local farmers are often left without a source of income and the environmental quality of the contaminated areas degrades. Not only soils, but often also water resources are impacted by the presence of contaminants which in turn may be reflected on the health of local populations. In addition, in associated countries like Ukraine, large extents of land are left uncultivated and vast areas of the country are unexploited because of low demand for agricultural products. Bioenergy offers an alternative productive use of all afore-mentioned lands where the biomass is not used for food or feed production but for energy purposes.
In line with its above outlined vision, FORBIO has the following specific objectives:
1. Identification of social, economic, environmental and governance-related opportunities and challenges for advanced bioenergy deployment through a series of multi-stakeholder consultations;
2. Evaluation of the agronomic and techno-economic potential of the selected advanced bioenergy value chains in the case study sites of the target countries;
3. Assessment of the environmental, social and economic sustainability of the selected advanced bioenergy value chains in the target countries;
4. Analysis of the economic and non-economic barriers to the market uptake of the selected sustainable bioenergy technologies; and development of strategies to remove the aforementioned barriers, including identification of roles and responsibilities of relevant stakeholders;
5. Encouraging European farmers to produce non-food bioenergy carriers and capacity building of economic actors and other relevant stakeholders for setting up sustainable local bioenergy supply chains.
