Table 1 provides an overview of national renewable energy targets for the year 2020, shares of renewable energies in the year 2005, and shares of woody biomass in the countries investigated in this study in the year 2011. In the last decade, the demand for energy wood in Europe increased and experts expect a further increase in future due to socio-political changes. The demand for ES is dynamic and influenced by societal transformations, political preferences and changing environmental conditions. Particular ES offer socio-cultural or economic benefits such as health, employment and income. Different characteristics of countries and regions need to be considered, and decisions need to be fostered by long-term and far-reaching political frameworks.įorests fulfil different functions and provide a variety of ecosystem services (ES) which are categorised into provisioning services such as timber supply, regulating services such as hydrological functions, supporting services such as biodiversity, and cultural services such as recreation. ConclusionsĮffects of energy wood production and use need to be taken into account in policy development and forest management in order to address current and future trade-offs and to tap the full potential of synergies related to other forest ES.
Furthermore, stakeholders continue the classic debate about forest protection versus forest use in the energy wood context. Stakeholders perceive a strong synergy with employment whereas trade-offs regarding conservation of biodiversity are the most critical issue related to energy wood production in forests. The results of this empirical study indicate that, across the five countries, stakeholders perceive similar trade-offs and synergies. For the analysis, we adopted a qualitative content analysis approach.
We developed an explorative research approach and conducted semi-structured interviews with a total of 103 interviewees of six selected stakeholder groups in five European countries: Finland, Germany, Norway, Slovenia and Spain. The objective of this paper was to provide a qualitative analysis of stakeholders’ perceptions of current and future trade-offs as well as of synergies between energy wood production and use and other forest ecosystem services (ES).
In the last decade, the demand for and supply of energy wood from forests has increased, and experts expect a further increase in the future due to political and societal changes.
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