Model collaboration for the improved assessment of biomass supply, demand, and impacts

Existing assessments of biomass supply and demand and their impacts face various types of limitations and uncertainties, partly due to the type of tools and methods applied (e.g., partial representation of sectors, lack of geographical details, and aggregated representation of technologies involved).  Improved collaboration between existing modeling approaches may provide new, more comprehensive insights, especially into issues that involve multiple economic sectors, different temporal and spatial scales, or various impact categories.

Three key research areas are selected to illustrate how model collaboration can provide additional ways for tackling some of the shortcomings and uncertainties in the assessment of biomass supply and demand and their impacts. These research areas are livestock production, agricultural residues, and greenhouse gas emissions from land-use change. Describing how model collaboration might look like in these examples, we show how improved model collaboration can strengthen our ability to project biomass supply, demand, and impacts. This in turn can aid in improving the information for policy-makers and in taking better-informed decisions.

Authors

Birka Wicke, Floor van der Hilst, Vassilis Daioglou, Martin Banse, Tim Beringer, Sarah Gerssen-Gondelach, Sanne Heijnen, Derek Karssenberg, David Laborde, Melvin Lippe, Hans van Meijl, André Nassar, Jeff Powell, Anne Gerdien Prins, Steve N. K. Rose, Edward M. W. Smeets, Elke Stehfest, Wallace E. Tyner, Judith A. Verstegen, Hugo Valin, Detlef P. van Vuuren, Sonia Yeh, André P. C. Faaij

Specifications

Publication title
Model collaboration for the improved assessment of biomass supply, demand, and impacts
Publication date
29 April 2014
Publication type
Publication
Magazine
Global Change Biology Bioenergy
Product number
1461