Sustainable harvesting of biomass from forests - development of methods for sustainability analysis

Biomass harvesting must be sustainable from an environmental-, social- and economic perspective. For example, at the biofuel market sustainable harvesting is required and it is important to be able to demonstrate the consequences of different harvesting volumes. A synthesis must be based on current knowledge on environmental impact of biomass harvesting, however there must also be methods for combining different factors and balance against different goals decided by the society. In this project we use a model, ToSIA, developed for analyzing alternative situations for the whole forest wood chain. The purpose is to provide the Swedish energy Agency with a tool to visualize the economic, social and environmental consequences by different use of biomass from Swedish forests to be used for informed decisions about future sustainable bioenergy strategies.