Sustainable Bioeconomy Futures – From Malaysia to South East Asia

This initiative aims at looking at multiple sustainable pathways of bioenergy in Malaysia and South East Asia to support the development of a sustainable bioeconomy in SEA through providing economic benefits and bio-physical assessments of multiple development pathways in the Malaysia and SEA-region.

The vast potential contribution of bioenergy to Malaysia’s sustainable development requires comprehensive assessment that is conducted using a system perspective covering land use, energy and biophysical productivity issues. Moreover, the potential significance of bioenergy in Malaysia represents a wider bioeconomy potential that is yet to unfold. Bioeconomy explores the production of renewable biological resources and the conversion of these resources and waste streams into value added products, such as food, feed, bio-based products and bioenergy. The project aims to generate sustainable pathways of bioenergy development as an important element of developing sustainable bioeconomy pathways for Malaysia.

Objectives

• Formulating sustainable bioenergy development pathways for Malaysia using oil palm based commodities
• Building BeWhere Malaysia as an open source and contextualized analytical tool to address research topics that  deal with the country’s bioenergy potential pathways
• Building lasting collaboration capacity in Malaysia for future application and development of BeWhere Malaysia applications
• Initiating discussion on sustainable futures for Malaysia focusing on a broader bioeconomy relevance with possible expansion to the South East Asia region

Together with the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and Academy of Sciences Malaysia, IIASA’s ESM-CLR will develop an integrated analysis of spatially explicit supply chain design scenarios and cost-competitiveness implication on bioenergy application of oil palm based materials in Malaysia. This analysis will result in a whitepaper on scenario analysis and policy recommendations for enhancing sustainable utilization of oil palm based bioenergy application in Malaysia as well as scientific publications covering four bioenergy application. A BeWhere Malaysia model, as a spatially explicit technoeconomic national model, will also be developed, addressing bioenergy supply chains that deal with competition of biomass feedstock utilization for multiple energy carriers. In addition the model will address various productivity scenarios of oil palm (with possible expansion to other relevant crops) as biomass feedstock through the support of productivity database generated by biophysical models.

Last edited: 08 March 2021