The European Union could 'triple' the amount of biomass produced on a sustainable basis over the coming decades while helping to restore land damaged by industrial pollution, poor farming, erosion and climate change, says André Faaij.
André Faaij is Director of Science at the Energy Transition unit of TNO, the Dutch independent research organization. He is also a distinguished professor at the University of Groningen, Netherlands.
Faaij has contributed to several reports, such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World and Global Energy Assessment and the IEA's World Energy Outlook.
Op www.euroactiv.com he explains in an extensive interview how biomass can indeed contribute to a better climate.
Notable highlights from the interview include:
- Marginally degraded lands can be regenerated with a mixture of crops that produce biomass or biofuels as a by-product.
- Replanting those lands with salt-tolerant species could be a way to regenerate those lands, protect them from further erosion, reduce salt problems and get more carbon into the soil
- That would be biomass that has ecological benefits, would not compete with food and would store more carbon on top of the biomass produced.
- On a global scale, “hundreds of millions of hectares” of land could be used to support crops that help restore degraded or marginal lands.
- In Europe, these lands represent “several tens of million hectares” – such as semi-arid lands in Spain and Italy, and contaminated industrial lands, including even the Chernobyl area.
- NGOs' argument that forests should be left untouched is “fundamentally flawed” because it ignores the fact that forests are suffering from climate change and need maintenance to prevent ecological collapse. Productive forests also absorb more carbon.
- Looking at total available production, Europe could triple the sustainable availability of biomass while strengthening the other Green Deal objectives such as reforestation and afforestation.
[ Photo: Oregon Department of Forestry / Flickr ]
