Tim Beringer

Research Institute for Sustainability (RIFS)

Can the world meet growing demand for food while sharply reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture – and without converting more forests into agriculture? In the World Resources Report: Creating a Sustainable Food Future, WRI set forth a challenging, global five-course menu of actions to do so. How should a country adapt this menu to its o...

Land-based greenhouse gas removal (GGR) options include afforestation or reforestation (AR), wetland restoration, soil carbon sequestration (SCS), biochar, terrestrial enhanced weathering (TEW), and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). We assess the opportunities and risks associated with these options through the lens of their potent...

Non-technical summary Global land is turning into an increasingly scarce resource. We here present a comprehensive assessment of co-occuring land-use change from 2000 until 2010, compiling existing spatially explicit data sources for different land uses, and building on a rich literature addressing specific land-use changes in all world regions. Th...

The most recent IPCC assessment has shown an important role for negative emissions technologies (NETs) in limiting global warming to 2 °C cost-effectively. However, a bottom-up, systematic, reproducible, and transparent literature assessment of the different options to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is currently missing. In part 1 of this three-par...

With the Paris Agreement's ambition of limiting climate change to well below 2 °C, negative emission technologies (NETs) have moved into the limelight of discussions in climate science and policy. Despite several assessments, the current knowledge on NETs is still diffuse and incomplete, but also growing fast. Here, we synthesize a comprehensive bo...

The special issue Scaling up bioenergy? identifies major policy expectations attached to biofuels production worldwide, and it provides systematic reviews of actual biofuel performance and governance in these areas. Papers address the extent to which policy expectations related to climate change mitigation, energy security, rural livelihoods and ri...

Land is under pressure from a number of demands, including the need for increased supplies of bioenergy. While bioenergy is an important ingredient in many pathways compatible with reaching the 2 °C target, areas where cultivation of the biomass feedstock would be most productive appear to co-host other important ecosystems services. We categorize...

Scientific Brief for the Global Sustainable Development Report 2015 (online). UN Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform.

Understanding patterns, dynamics, and drivers of land use is crucial for improving our ability to cope with sustainability challenges. The human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) framework provides a set of integrated socio-ecological indicators that quantify how land use alters energy flows in ecosystems via land conversions and biom...

Do the wet savannahs and shrublands of Africa provide a large reserve of potential croplands to produce food staples or bioenergy with low carbon and biodiversity costs? We find that only small percentages of these lands have meaningful potential to be low-carbon sources of maize (�2%) or soybeans (9.5–11.5%), meaning that their conversion would re...

The potential for climate change mitigation by bioenergy crops and terrestrial carbon sinks has been the object of intensive research in the past decade. There has been much debate about whether energy crops used to offset fossil fuel use, or carbon sequestration in forests, would provide the best climate mitigation benefit. Most current food cropl...

Existing assessments of biomass supply and demand and their impacts face various types of limitations and uncertainties, partly due to the type of tools and methods applied (e.g., partial representation of sectors, lack of geographical details, and aggregated representation of technologies involved). Improved collaboration between existing modeling...

The political will to reduce global GHG emissions has largely contributed to increased global biofuel production and trade. The expanding cultivation of energy crops may drive changes in the terrestrial ecosystems such as land cover and biodiversity loss. When biomass replaces fossil energy carriers, sustainability criteria are there-fore crucial t...

Widespread cropland abandonment occurred after the collapse of socialism across the former Soviet Union, but the rates and spatial patterns of abandoned lands are not well known. As a result, the potential of this region to contribute to global food production and estimates of the carbon sink developing on currently idle lands are highly uncertain....

Land use change is responsible for about 15% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Major efforts are underway to reduce deforestation and expansion of agriculture for food production which are responsible for the ongoing depletion of terrestrial carbon (C) stocks. At the same time, the global demand for biomass as an energy source is rising. Re...

In the past, deforestation, mainly driven by the conversion of natural forests to agricultural land, contributed up to one-fifth of global human induced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Substitution of bioenergy for fossil energy is an intensely discussed option for mitigating CO2 emissions. This paper, by applying a global land-use model and a glob...

In nie dagewesener Größenordnung greift der Mensch durch die Verbrennung fossiler Energieträger und der weiträumigen Umgestaltung der Landoberfläche in die globale Umwelt ein. Klimawandel und Übernutzung natürlicher Ressourcen könnten schon in diesem Jahrhundert die Anpassungsfähigkeiten vieler ökologischer und sozialer Systeme übersteigen und somi...

Biomass from cellulosic bioenergy crops is seen as a substantial part of future energy systems, especially if climate policy aims at stabilizing CO2 concentration at low levels. However, among other concerns of sustainability, the large-scale use of bioenergy is controversial because it is hypothesized to increase the competition for land and there...

In the coming decades, an increasing competition for global land and water resources can be expected, due to rising demand for agricultural products, goals of nature conservation, and changing production conditions due to climate change. Especially biomass from cellulosic bioenergy crops, such as Miscanthus or poplar, is being proposed to play a su...

Biomass from cellulosic bioenergy crops is expected to play a substantial role in future energy systems, especially if climate policy aims at stabilizing greenhouse gas concentration at low levels. However, the potential of bioenergy for climate change mitigation remains unclear due to large uncertainties about future agricultural yield improvement...

Current controversies and debates on bioenergy production in the areas of greenhouse gases emission reduction, food and energy security, social exclusion and welfare erosion, and ecosystem deterioration attest to the challenges which the bioenergy sector has to overcome to achieve its global production potentials. Because it is yet an evolving sect...

We estimate the global bioenergy potential from dedicated biomass plantations in the 21st century under a range of sustainability requirements to safeguard food production, biodiversity and terrestrial carbon storage. We use a process-based model of the land biosphere to simulate rainfed and irrigated biomass yields driven by data from different cl...

Bio-energy, that is, energy produced from organic non-fossil material of biological origin, is promoted as a substitute for non-renewable (e.g., fossil) energy to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and dependency on energy imports. At present, global bio-energy use amounts to approximately 50 EJ/yr, about 10% of humanity's primary energy supply....

Increased future demands for food, fibre and fuels from biomass can only be met if the available land and water resources on a global scale are used and managed as efficiently as possible. The main routes for making the global agricultural system more productive are through intensification and technological change on currently used agricultural lan...

Increased future demands for food, fibre and fuels from biomass can only be met if the available land and water resources on a global scale are used and managed as efficiently as possible. The main routes for making the global agricultural system more productive are through intensification and technological change on currently used agricultural lan...