Abstract
Energy security has become a priority as the world’s population increases and its standard of living improves, thus increasing energy consumption. As the demand for energy increases, there is growing concern about the possible exhaustion of finite supplies of fossil fuels in the not-too-distant future. In addition to the problem of availability, combustion of fossil fuels also has negative environmental effects: air pollution (e.g. particulates, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide) produced through the combustion of fossil fuels, threatens human health as well as plant and animal life. Furthermore, the combustion of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, thus contributing to an increase in global temperature. These considerations lead to a search for alternative, renewable sources of energy, one of which is bioenergy.
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Notes
- 1.
The appropriate discount rate is controversial, as is the period over which discounting should be done. However, for comparing the competitive attractiveness of different agricultural uses it makes no difference what method is used, as long as it is the same method for all. What is important is that a bid price is reached that realistically reflects the competitive strength of the agricultural sector as compared to other land uses. This strength is low: almost all other land uses offer higher returns per hectare than agriculture, which means that agriculture effectively functions as the balancing entry in the land use accounts. The only land uses offering lower returns are for forest and Nature, but these tend to be protected by law. The values arrived at here for agricultural bid prices remain well below those used for competing land uses in Land Use Scanner (e.g. €20/m2 for recreation).
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Acknowledgement
We are grateful to the Dutch National Research Programme on Climate Change and Spatial Planning for financing part of the research described here. Another part was funded under the Knowledge Base programme of the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality. We are, furthermore, grateful to the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (MNP) and the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute for providing the modelling framework of Land Use Scanner and parts of the scenario definitions.
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Kuhlman, T., Verburg, R., van Dijk, J., Phan-Drost, N. (2011). Biomass on Peat Soils?. In: Koomen, E., Borsboom-van Beurden, J. (eds) Land-Use Modelling in Planning Practice. GeoJournal Library, vol 101. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1822-7_6
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