Integrated approach for sustainable allocation of biomass crops in Europe: insights from the S2BIOM project

Introduction The European Union aims at raising the share of energy consumption produced from renewable resources to 20% in 2020 as compared to 1990. Moreover, the European Commission adopted a strategy called "Innovating for Sustainable Growth: a Bioeconomy for Europe" to shift the European economy towards greater and more sustainable use of renewable resources. The S2Biom project (www.s2biom.eu) - Delivery of sustainable supply of non-food biomass to support a "resource-efficient" Bioeconomy in Europe - supports the sustainable delivery of non-food biomass feedstock at local, regional and pan-European levels through developing strategies and roadmaps that will be render available to the user by a "computerized and easy to use" toolset (and respective databases) with updated harmonized datasets at local, regional, national and pan-European level for EU-28, Western Balkans, Moldova, Turkey and Ukraine. Methodology Taking in consideration the results and experiences of current and past EU projects, the S2Biom project activities are implemented in three individual but strongly interrelated Themes: 1) To focus on methodological approaches, data collection and estimation of sustainable biomass potentials resources, efficient pathways and optimal logistical supply routes as well as the development of a computerised toolset. 2) To make use of the findings of Theme 1 and develop a Vision, strategies and a R&D roadmap for sustainable delivery of non-food biomass feedstock at local, regional and pan- European levels. 3) To validate the results from themes 1 and 2 and ensure the project outreach; this will be performed through selected case studies which will efficiently capture the different scales of applications for biomass supply chains in a sufficient number of regions across Europe. Conclusion The first draft version of this toolset have been developed, allowing to analyse different levels of bioenergy production, its costs and feedstock biomass crops available across EU at a resolution level of Nuts3.