Enhancing the adoption of short rotation woody crops for bioenergy production

Short rotation woody crops (SRWC) have not been widely adopted as a viable feedstock for bioenergy production. We discuss three major information needs for R&D Managers improving adoption prospects for SRWC: (1) Understand how R&D affects the economics of SRWC – particularly “unit costs” of production; (2) Prices and trends for energy and environmental improvement and how these compare to SRWC costs; (3) Integrated biological and economic models. To enhance adoption prospects for SRWC R&D Managers should seek to lower unit costs to make these types of plantations more competitive with other energy alternatives. If non-market values are used as an argument to justify SRWC R&D investments managers still need to address adoption impediments. Even if non-market values are significant, adoption is required for society to realize benefits. We also argue that bioeconomic models can help identify needs, opportunities and challenges and illustrate some of these principles with an empirical example from Canada.