Land Identified as Crucial for Swedish Bioenergy Is Already Occupied, New Study Shows

Published 11 December 2024

A field of grass fodder on a sunny day of summer — Grass fodder production in southern Sweden. Photo: Josefin Winberg.

Bioenergy plays a vital role in the transition to a fossil-free society. However, the "unused" agricultural land, so-called marginal land, deemed suitable for bioenergy cultivation in southern Sweden is practically nonexistent, according to a new study from Lund University. Much of the land is already in use, for example, for horse grazing.

"Our study shows that the potential for bioenergy production on marginal land is, in practice, very limited," says Josefin Winberg, one of the study’s authors and a recent PhD graduate in Environmental Science at Lund University, and a member of BECC. Her dissertation focuses on sustainable bioenergy production in agricultural landscapes.

In the study, researchers combined remote sensing with analyses of public land use data in southern Sweden. This was done to identify land that is no longer in use or only marginally profitable for farming, so-called marginal land. The purpose was to investigate how much marginal land is actually available for cultivating energy crops. An earlier study assumed that all land that has exited the agricultural subsidy system in recent decades could potentially be available for bioenergy production. This assumption has underpinned many national calculations of Sweden’s bioenergy potential.