Crop and Forest Waste Could Reshape the Global Energy Map, Study Finds

Every year, the world’s farms and forests generate an enormous stream of leftover material—straw, husks, stalks, branches, sawdust, and other residues—that is largely burned in fields, left to decompose, or otherwise discarded. A new study published in Nature Communications argues that this overlooked biomass, known collectively as agricultural and forestry residues, could become a cornerstone of the global energy transition, but only if policymakers understand that its sustainability benefits vary dramatically from one region of the world to another. The research, led by Chaoshuo Liu, Junnian Song, Wei Yang, and Jingzheng Ren, with colleagues at Jilin University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, University College London, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, offers one of the most comprehensive attempts yet to map where residue-based bioenergy would genuinely advance sustainable development and where it would fall short.

The appeal of agricultural and forestry residues as an energy feedstock is straightforward. Unlike dedicated energy crops, which require land that might otherwise grow food or support natural ecosystems, residues are byproducts of existing agricultural and forestry activity. Harnessing them for energy does not, in principle, compete directly with food production, and it can reduce waste, lower open-burning emissions, and displace fossil fuels. This makes residue-based bioenergy one of the few renewable options that simultaneously touches on energy security, climate mitigation, and rural waste management. Yet the authors note that the mechanisms by which optimizing multiple pathways of residue utilization advances sustainability in different socioeconomic contexts have remained underexplored, leaving a significant gap between the theoretical promise of these resources and their real-world deployment.

To close that gap, the research team built an analytical framework they call the Integrated AFR-to-Energy System, or IAES. The framework integrates two well-established modeling approaches. The first is the Global Change Analysis Model, a widely used integrated assessment model that simulates how energy systems, land use, economies, and climate evolve together over decades. The second is life cycle assessment, a technique that traces the environmental impacts of a product or system from raw material extraction through processing, conversion, transport, and end use. By coupling these two tools within an optimized IAES framework, the researchers could evaluate not just how much energy residues could provide, but how converting those residues through different technological configurations would ripple across environmental and socioeconomic indicators.

The scope of the analysis is ambitious. The team projected the sustainability contributions of global IAES deployment out to the year 2060, using combinations of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and Representative Concentration Pathways. These scenario families are the standard vocabulary of long-term climate and development research: the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways describe alternative futures for global population, economic growth, technology, and policy, while the Representative Concentration Pathways describe different levels of greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere. By running the coupled framework across combined scenarios, the researchers could test how robust their conclusions were under a range of plausible futures rather than a single forecast, an approach that guards against the false confidence of point predictions.

The study focused its evaluation on contributions related to selected Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations’ blueprint for global progress adopted in 2015. Rather than treating sustainability as a single aggregate score, the framework assessed how residue-based bioenergy deployment would affect specific goals, allowing the researchers to identify both synergies and trade-offs. This goal-by-goal approach matters because a technology that strongly advances affordable clean energy might do little for poverty reduction, or might even create tensions between objectives, and such nuances are invisible in coarser analyses.

The headline finding is that regional disparities in sustainability contributions are driven by three interlocking factors: the local availability of agricultural and forestry residues, the technology configurations chosen to convert them, and prevailing socioeconomic conditions. In other words, the same kilogram of straw or sawdust can deliver very different sustainability outcomes depending on where it sits, what infrastructure exists to process it, and how wealthy and institutionally capable the surrounding economy is. This finding cuts against the temptation to treat bioenergy as a uniform global solution and instead frames it as a portfolio of regionally distinct opportunities and constraints.

The geographic pattern that emerges from the analysis is striking. Canada leads the world in sustainability gains from residue-based bioenergy deployment. According to the study, energy output from IAES deployment in Canada could meet nearly 20 percent of the country’s energy demand by 2060, and the nation excels particularly in contributions related to SDG 7, which concerns affordable and clean energy, and SDG 13, which concerns climate action. Canada’s position reflects a favorable combination of abundant forestry residues from its vast timber sector, a developed industrial and energy infrastructure capable of converting and distributing biomass energy, and a high-capacity economy able to absorb the capital costs of deployment. Eastern Europe follows as the next standout region, making notable strides on SDG 1, which targets the eradication of poverty, suggesting that residue-based energy systems there could deliver meaningful socioeconomic as well as environmental benefits.

At the other end of the spectrum, the study delivers a sobering message about the developing world. Most lower-middle-to-low income regions struggle to achieve meaningful sustainability benefits from residue-based bioenergy, despite often possessing substantial volumes of agricultural residue. The reasons are embedded in the three drivers the study identifies: residues may be dispersed and costly to collect, conversion technologies may be unavailable or unaffordable, and socioeconomic conditions—including limited capital, infrastructure deficits, and institutional constraints—can prevent even technically feasible systems from delivering broad benefits. China, despite being a major agricultural producer with enormous residue volumes, shows comparatively limited prospects in the analysis, underscoring that resource abundance alone does not guarantee sustainability gains.

These results carry significant implications for energy policy. For wealthy, residue-rich countries such as Canada, the findings suggest that residue-based bioenergy deserves a prominent place in national decarbonization strategies, potentially supplying a fifth of energy demand by mid-century while advancing both clean energy and climate goals. For regions like Eastern Europe, the poverty-reduction dimension of the findings points to bioenergy as a tool that could couple energy transition with socioeconomic development. But for lower-income regions, the study implies that simply promoting residue-based bioenergy without addressing underlying constraints—collection logistics, technology access, financing, and institutional capacity—is unlikely to produce the sustainability dividends that global bioenergy advocates often promise. International support mechanisms, technology transfer, and targeted investment may therefore be prerequisites for equitable participation in this energy pathway.

The study also demonstrates the value of methodological integration in sustainability science. By combining an integrated assessment model with life cycle assessment inside an optimization framework, the researchers captured both the macro-level dynamics of global energy and climate systems and the micro-level environmental accounting of specific conversion pathways. The scenario-based design, spanning multiple combined SSP-RCP futures through 2060, provides a comparative foundation that the authors say can inform bioenergy deployment strategies across regional contexts as part of the broader effort to advance the energy transition and the Sustainable Development Goals. As governments worldwide search for ways to decarbonize without sacrificing development, this research offers a reminder that the sustainability of any energy technology is not a fixed property but a function of place, context, and design—and that the humble leftovers of farms and forests may be among the most context-dependent resources of all.

Subject of Research: Global sustainability impacts of agricultural and forestry residue-based bioenergy deployment under socioeconomic and climate scenarios to 2060

Article Title: Prospects and complexities in sustainability impacts of global residue-based bioenergy deployment

Article References: Liu, C., Song, J., Deng, S., Xing, J., Cao, Q., Yang, W., & Ren, J. (2026). Prospects and complexities in sustainability impacts of global residue-based bioenergy deployment. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-78339-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-78339-6

Keywords: bioenergy, agricultural residues, forestry residues, sustainable development goals, life cycle assessment, integrated assessment model, Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, climate mitigation, energy transition, Canada, Eastern Europe, regional disparities