Forest-based bioeconomy pathways with emerging lignocellulosic products: A modelling approach : [paper for] XV World Forestry Congress, Coex, Soul, Republic of Korea, 2-6 May 2022

The forest-based sector plays an important role in a growing bioeconomy. Long-term resource availability and allocation will be a major challenge for the bioeconomy development. Therefore, this study aims to assess how forest product markets could develop in a growing bioeconomy and which interdependencies occur between traditional and emerging forest-based subsectors. Especially, the demand for wood-based textile fibres could dynamically grow over the next decades while there might be conflicting demand for wood resources from traditional subsectors. Thus, we include dissolving pulp, lignocellulose-based textile fibres and chemical derivatives in our modelling assessment. For this purpose, we extend the product structure of a partial equilibrium model, the Global Forest Products Model (GFPM). We use an econometric approach to compute demand and trade elasticities of the emerging products. We parameterize the extended model with these elasticities and analyze three different bioeconomy scenarios. In the first scenario, the demand for woody biomass remains similar to the current pattern. In the second scenario, the use of woody biomass increases primarily to satisfy growing input demand from the energy sector. In the third scenario, biomass is increasingly used as input to produce diverse industrial and everyday products. The simulation results show that, in the third scenario, where the world is changing toward a sustainable bioeconomy, wood consumption pattern shift away from fuelwood (-30% by 2050) and paper products (-32% by 2050) towards emerging products. In this context, the dissolving pulp subsector could outpace the continuously shrinking paper pulp subsector in 2050. For this development, the dissolving pulp subsector mainly uses released resources from the decreasing paper pulp production. Simultaneously, wood-based panels are increasingly applied (+196% by 2050) while the growth of sawnwood remains limited.