Fact: The amount of abandoned farmland in Europe, including European Russia, is equivalent to the existing farmland of France, the UK and Ireland combined.
In the last chapter, we explored how boosting the growth of wood fibre could provide us with the quantities required to significantly increase the use of wood in the built environment and the growing bioeconomy. This would involve wood fibre produced on European farms, in addition to that already grown in the forest. It would also be possible alongside the provision of biomass for the energy sector, until other energy sources could replace biomass from both the forest and the farm – if that is what we decide we want to do. It is likely that some percentage of energy will still be sourced from biomass all the way to 2050.
Do we have the spare land to produce the wood fibre we need? While the global population continues to rise, as does the population of the UK, pressure on our finite land resources from competing demands is intense and where there is a high ratio of people to land, as in the UK, we need to be sure we are optimizing how we use our land in general. Wood fibre is only part of the picture. In this chapter, we will ask if there is sufficient land and whether it can produce enough wood fibre to meet the growing demand. In Chapter 10, we shall explore whether this can be done without negatively impacting food production.
Across the world there is a surprising amount of land that has been abandoned because human activity has ended. This includes areas which were used for farming, mining, manufacturing, settlements and so on: “since the 1950s, abandoned land has accumulated to up to 400 million ha [hectares] globally, an area roughly half the size of Australia”. At a European level, the majority of abandoned land is to be found in central and eastern Europe, including European Russia, and this is where the increase in wood fibre production could best come from. After the Second World War, these countries, all under communist regimes, nationalized their agricultural land, creating state or collective farms (only in Poland did a small number of private farms persist).
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