Final Report Global and Regional Spatial Distribution of Biomass Potentials

The German Government’s Integrated Energy and Climate Programme (IEKP) and the National Biomass Action Plan set ambitious targets for the further development of bioenergy until 2020. The share of energy from biomass is supposed to reach 8 % and 9.7 % of the total power consumption and of the total heat usage, respectively. The share of biofuels on the total consumption of fuels for transportation should rise up to 12 % (energetic) by 2020. This project aims to assess the possibilities of achieving the IEKP targets for bioenergy in a regional and global context. On a regional as well as global level, the potentials of different biomasses were determined in different development scenarios until 2020. Furthermore, the extent to which remote sensing could contribute in improving the spatial specification of biomass resources and whether it could be used as a monitoring system for the early detection of land use changes was investigated. On the regional level, the spatial implications of energetic biomass use was analysed with regard to environmental impacts and land use conflicts. Depending on their significance of spatial impacts, instruments of spatial planning were assessed in order to steer the supply of bioenergy. [... from Executive Summary