Modelling bioeconomy scenario pathways for the forest products markets with emerging lignocellulosic products

Abstract

The forest-based sector plays diverse roles among the emerging bio-based industries. The goal of this study is to examine how forest product markets could develop in the face of a growing bioeconomy and which interdependencies occur between traditional and emerging forest-based sectors. Therefore, we analyze the development of dissolving pulp together with lignocellulose-based textile fibres and chemical derivatives in a partial equilibrium model. For this purpose, we extend the product structure of the Global Forest Products Model (GFPM) and analyze three different bioeconomy scenarios from 2015 to 2050. The simulation results show that, in a scenario where the world is changing toward a sustainable bio-economy, wood consumption patterns shift away from fuelwood (−30% by 2050) and classical paper products (−32% by 2050) towards emerging wood-based products. In this context, the dissolving pulp subsector could outpace the continuously shrinking paper pulp subsector by 2050. To develop in this way, the dissolving pulp subsector mainly uses released resources from the decreasing paper pulp production. Simultaneously, wood-based panels are finding increasing application (+196% by 2050) and thus are taking over potential markets for sawn wood, for which production growth remains limited. Our results also show that, until 2050, the production of many wood-based products will take place mainly in Asia instead of North America and Europe.