Integrated modelling approach to assess woody biomass supply, demand and environmental impacts of forest management in the EU

Forests are at the intersection of European policies on climate, energy and environmental protection and will contribute significantly to the shift of the European economy towards a greater and more sustainable use of renewable resources. Knowledge of the current and future provision and use of woody biomass is necessary to support multiple policies, provide insight into how forest ecosystems and their services will respond to increasing material and energy demand, climate change, and land use competition. The main data source for forest biomass data in the European Union are National Forest Inventories (NFIs). These are carried out based on country-specific requirements and definitions, therefore varying from country to country. The first challenge is therefore the integration of these data into a single modelling platform for simultaneous and seamless processing. Here we describe the efforts of a multi-disciplinary team who has developed modular pan-European modelling set-up to assess the demand and potential supply of woody biomass to the bioeconomy and the impacts of associated harvests using data sourced from heterogeneous NFIs. The modelling framework covers national-level wood-based commodity production and trade, spatially-explicit forest growth and carbon budget, analysis of the role of energy technologies and energy consumption and land-use systems. The hub of this modelling set-up is implemented in a readable and editable modelling script to facilitate dialogue between the modellers. These scripts are where the models meet and exchange data processes for different models, and are capable of resolving issues of thematic and spatial resolution and imputing missing data to enhance the exchange between the models. The philosophy behind this particular set-up is one of furthering policy coherence: to inform different and sometimes conflicting policies using the same base data, modelling framework and expertise in a modular way as well as to provide appropriate and consistent outputs, ranging from environmental indicators to indicators about the wood-based industry.