Research

The bioeconomy is a key strategy for addressing global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource scarcity. By promoting the sustainable use of renewable biological resources, including agricultural crops, forests, and biomass residues, it offers opportunities to substitute greenhouse gas-intensive fossil resources in sectors such as construction, chemicals, and energy. At the same time, biomass is a fundamental component of ecosystem functioning and the global carbon cycle, meaning its use involves important trade-offs between climate mitigation, biodiversity protection, and food security. Although biomass is renewable, it is not unlimited. Land availability is finite, ecosystems are already under pressure, and increased biomass demand may intensify competition for land, water, and nutrients. While bioenergy and bio-based materials can contribute to decarbonization, particularly in hard-to-abate sectors, their sustainability depends strongly on sourcing practices, resource efficiency, and the consideration of opportunity costs, such as carbon storage in ecosystems. This highlights the need to treat biomass as a scarce resource that must be managed within ecological limits. This study aims to provide a comprehensive, evidence-based assessment of the sustainable global biomass potential and the constraints shaping its availability, with particular attention to G20 economies. It will assess whether sustainably available land-based biomass can meet current and future demand for food, feed, materials, and energy toward 2030 and 2050, and evaluate the role of technological innovation, circular economy approaches, trade, and demand-side measures in reducing potential supply–demand gaps. The study is aimed to provide a robust knowledge base to inform international policy dialogues and support the development of bioeconomy strategies that balance climate action, biodiversity conservation, and food security.

The Emission Trading System 2 of the European Union (ETS2) will introduce uniform EU-wide carbon pricing for fossil car fuels, affecting a large share of households across the Union. A recent study on residential heating (Bertelsmann Stiftung 2026), using a synthetic EU population of 188 million households, shows that while roughly half of all households are affected, the majority can absorb the additional costs. However, a significant minority faces substantial financial burdens – particularly in Eastern and Southern Europe. The study further demonstrates that ETS2 revenues are, in principle, sufficient to cushion the most adverse distributional impacts. Beyond residential energy use, fossil car fuel consumption constitutes the second major sector covered by ETS2. Yet this sector has not been analysed with comparable granularity. Closing this gap is essential, not least because a comprehensive assessment is required to evaluate the full redistributive potential of ETS2 revenues. This project therefore aims to provide a detailed analysis of the regional and social impacts of carbon pricing in the transport sector, thereby enabling a more complete and policy-relevant evaluation of ETS2.

The project explores the environmental history of forests in the area of the present-day national park Berchtesgaden, building on the historical sources kept in the local forest archive. It pursues two main thematic foci: The first explores how forest use (management, forest grazing, hunting) evolved in Berchtesgaden since the late 18th century. It further investigates the effects of these management changes on forest C dynamics. Important sources include visitation protocols, forest maps, forest cutting plans and overviews, and descriptions of servitute rights. Using methods such as C accounting and modelling, C stocks and fluxes in forest ecosystems will be reconstructed and analysed over long time periods and in a spatially explicit way. The second research focus inquires how historical interventions (or their cessation) affect present-day biodiversity in the forests of Berchtesgaden. To this end, the data compiled in the first thematic focus will be complemented by further spatially explicit data and recent datasets on biodiversity and spatially analysed. The topics will be further developed in an environmental history dissertation project and specified depending on source availability, and in case of need, additional sources will be consulted beyond those of the Forest Archive in Berchtesgaden.