Author : Krystyna Springer

The utilisation of biomass can be a powerful tool in climate mitigation, offering both economic and environmental benefits. However, its climate impact is highly context-dependent, and concerns remain about the sustainable scale of its deployment. As the EU looks to aligning its policy mix with a new 2040 climate target, expectations for land resources are intensifying, with increasing demands to replace fossil inputs in energy and materials, while sustaining low-emission food production systems, supporting ecosystem recovery, and delivering carbon sequestration and resilience. In this context, a more comprehensive and coordinated bioeconomy policy framework is essential to manage trade-offs, avoid technological lock-ins, strategically direct bioresource supply, and ensure a cost-effective transition to carbon neutrality.

As recognised across several strategic elements of the EU policy framework1, the utilisation of biomass can be a powerful tool in climate mitigation, offering both economic and environmental benefits. However, its climate impact is highly context-dependent, and concerns remain about the sustainable scale of its deployment. As the EU looks to aligning its policy mix with a new 2040 climate target, expectations for land resources are intensifying, with increasing demands to replace fossil inputs in energy and materials, while sustaining low-emission food production systems, supporting ecosystem recovery, and delivering carbon sequestration and resilience. In this context, a more comprehensive and coordinated bioeconomy policy framework is essential to manage trade-offs, avoid technological lock-ins, strategically direct bioresource supply, and ensure a cost-effective transition to carbon neutrality.

As the EU prepares to release an updated Bioeconomy Strategy, this briefing examines the current policy framework governing biomass use and explores bioenergy pathways outlined in the Commission’s Impact Assessment accompanying the 2040 climate target communication. It highlights how: ·

• A persistent imbalance in policy incentives for biomaterials, bioenergy, and land carbon stock maintenance, alongside challenges in the implementation of sustainability safeguards, have had a negative impact on resource efficiency and the EU’s land-based net carbon removals.
• The bioenergy demand and supply projections indicate that, in the absence of demand-side adjustments, and considering the simultaneous policy ambition to scale up biomass use in material applications, the EU may be at risk of exceeding the limits of sustainable biomass availability.
• Biomass demand trajectories rely heavily on the future uncertain deployment of resource-intensive abatement technologies such as DACCS and e-fuels. If these technologies fail to scale and remain significantly costlier than more mature bio-based options like biofuels and BECCS, a shift to the latter could significantly increase pressure on land.
• Modelled trajectories for certain types of biomass feedstocks, which assume higher wood harvesting rates and an increase in the utilisation of secondary resources, present uncertain climate benefits in practice and may deviate from the cascading principle.
• Broader systemic uncertainties affect the land’s capacity to support the bioeconomy under the conditions of climate change, suggesting that projections for the available bioenergy supply and land carbon sinks may not hold in practice.
• The significance of demand-side variables in the Commission’s sensitivity analysis as part of the LIFE scenario, which underscores the risk reduction that can be achieved through consumption shifts – delivering environmental, social, and economic co-benefits by easing pressure on land.

The forthcoming revision of the EU Bioeconomy Strategy represents a window of opportunity to improve cross-sectoral policy integration and address rising pressures on land and biomass through better data, monitoring, and governance. Key priorities include aligning incentives across actors, shifting support from energy to higher-value material uses, and – crucially – implementing demand-side measures, which will be essential to ensuring the environmental integrity of the bioeconomy and achieving the EU’s 2040 climate targets.

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Photo by Alex Jones on Unsplash 

¹  See e.g. the Communication on Sustainable Carbon Cycles (COM/2021/800), Communication on the 2040 Climate Target (COM/2024/63), or the Competitiveness Compass COM/2025/30.