Forestry in bioeconomy – smart green growth for the humankind

This paper draws on the European Union's Bioeconomy Action Plan (BAP) to clarify the notion “bioeconomy” and examine how it relates to the forest sector and its current challenges. The interpretation is linked to a broader context of climate and energy policies and the ideas of green economy and green growth. It is shown that, despite its good intentions, BAP fails to link bioeconomy to the core idea of green economy and the sources of economic growth. It hardly discusses climate policies and entirely omits the land-use aspects between agriculture and forestry that are important for climate policies. An equally serious shortcoming is that BAP very vaguely recognizes the role and nature of the forest sector as a high-tech biomass utilizing sector and omits its current challenge to renew the product matrix from forest biomass as a response to the decreasing demand for paper. An overview of the topical issues in forest sector shows that it has and will have a great role in bioeconomy as a high-tech and high value-added sector producing all traditional products, bioenergy, and new forest products.