Abstract
European demand for renewable energy resources has led to rapidly increasing transatlantic exports of wood pellets from the southeastern United States (SE US) since 2009. Disagreements have arisen over the global greenhouse gas reductions associated with replacing coal with wood, and groups on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean have raised concerns that increasing biomass exports might negatively affect SE US forests and the ecosystem services they provide. We use the telecoupling framework to test assertions that the intended benefits of the wood pellet trade for Europe might be offset by negative consequences in the SE US. Through a review of current literature and available data sets, we characterize the observed and potential changes in the environmental, social, and economic components of the sending and receiving regions to assess the overall sustainability of this renewable energy system. We conclude that the observed transatlantic wood pellet trade is an example of a mutually beneficial telecoupled system with the potential to provide environmental and socioeconomic benefits in both the SE US and Europe despite some negative effects on the coal industry. We recommend continued monitoring of this telecoupled system to quantify the environmental, social, and economic interactions and effects in the sending, receiving, and spillover systems over time so that evidence-based policy decisions can be made with regard to the sustainability of this renewable energy pathway.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 28 |
| Journal | Ecology and Society |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2018 |
Funding
Partly because of sustainability concerns from European and U. S. NGOs, a certification program specifically intended for wood for energy was started in 2013. This Sustainable Biomass Partnership is industry led and is supported by European utilities Table 6. Potential effects of the telecoupled transatlantic wood pellet trade system. Positive (+), negative (−), and uncertain (0) effects are indicated for each subsystem (Table 1). This manuscript resulted from the collaboration of authors ES, AH, and CP during an April 2016 Telecoupling Workshop hosted by Dr. Jack Liu at the Annual Meeting of the U.S. Regional Association of the International Association for Landscape Ecology (US-IALE) in Asheville, North Carolina, USA. Authors ES and VD were supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under the Bioenergy Technologies Office. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is managed by UT-Battelle for the DOE under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725. Author CP was supported by NSF PIRE grant 1243444. We thank Keith Kline of ORNL and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. We also thank Keith Kline for his role in shaping many of the data analyses and ideas discussed in this paper.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| UT-Battelle | |
| National Science Foundation | 1243444 |
| U.S. Department of Energy | DE-AC05-00OR22725 |
| Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation | |
| Oak Ridge National Laboratory | |
| Bioenergy Technologies Office |
Keywords
- Bioenergy
- Biopower
- Climate change
- Ecosystem services
- Europe
- Forest management
- Renewable energy
- Southeast US
- Sustainability
- Wood pellets
