Press Release 26 January 2016
Has been launched in Bruxelles at the end of January, the project for the sustainable exploitation of biomass for bioenergy from marginal lands, whose acronym is SEEMLA. The Horizon 2020 funded project puts together eight partners from Germany, Ukraine, Greece and Italy and it will last until December 2018. Three years that will be focused on the reliable and sustainable exploitation of biomass from marginal lands (MagL), which are used neither for food nor feed production and are not posing an environmental threat. The fast growing competition between traditional food production and production of renewable bio-resources on arable land has been identified as one central problem of bio-economy strategies indeed. SEEMLA aims at overcoming this conflict by using marginal land sites that are widely available in the EU. For this reason, first challenge of the SEEMLA project is to assess good practices and refine current practices, making them more sustainable, in terms of environmental, economic, social issues.
The innovative land-use strategies will be tested in four pilot areas in Germany, Ukraine and Greece.
The project team is balanced between scientific and technical partners as well as national and regional organisations: the Agency for Renewable Resources (FNR, Germany), the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (Germany), the Brandenburg University of Technology (Germany), Legambiente Onlus (Italy), Democritus University of Thrace (Greece), the Decentralized Administration of Macedonia and Thrace (Greece), the Institute of Bioenergy Crops and Sugar Beet of the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences (Ukraine) and SALIX Energy Ltd. (Ukraine).
