Strategies to Reduce Land Use Competition and Increasing the Share of Biomass in the German Energy Supply

Bioenergy is expected to become one of the key energy resources for global sustainable development. However, bioenergy cannot be infinite, because the land area available for biomass production is limited and a certain amount of biomass must be reserved for food and materials. Land management is a topic that has long been neglected in sustainable development of bioenergy although land is a limited resource. That is now changing, mainly due to the political support for energy crops generating an increased competition for arable land on both a domestic and a global scale. This paper first gives an overview of the different land functions and the allocation of land use. Then, focusing on the German conditions, it investigates strategies to reduce the demand for land and the negative impact of land use.