Bioenergy policy for agriculture - farm biomass activities, food security, and conflicts with environmental goal

Society must respond in a multitude of ways to limit global temperature increase below two degrees. One possible avenue for change is to increase the use of bioenergy from agricultural biomass, to replace fossil-based energy. Agricultural bioenergy is not sufficiently profitable today and policy is required to boost the sector. With an increased use of agricultural biomass for energy comes however changes to land use and agricultural production generally. This will be accompanied by risk for adverse environmental consequences and by effects on the economic structure of the sector and food production, and will almost certainly cause conflicts between societal goals. Policy must hence be carefully designed to steer agricultural bioenergy production toward a solution where the societal benefits from production of food, feed and fibre, are in balance with environmental benefits. In my PhD work I use integrated modelling to study farm production decisions and land use changes in Sweden in response to policy change, to evaluate policy towards a societally optimal solution. A part of a larger multidisciplinary project, the contribution of my PhD project is to bring the economic perspective into the analysis of policy for sustainable agricultural biomass.