General information and context

Romanian forests have a huge potential for biomass production for energy and industrial uses. Biomass from forests and from agriculture currently covers 7% of the primary energy demand and 50% of the potential of the renewable energy in Romania (National Energy Strategy - NES, 2007). For instance, the biomass utilization has mainly focused on household firewood: direct burning, space heating, cooking and water heating account for around 95% of the current biomass exploitation, while industrial biomass use equals only 5% (Roland Berger, 2010).
While the firewood procurement was a traditional rural industry, in general related with the endemic illegal logging in Romania (Bouriaud, 2005; Saphores et al., 2006), only guesses and estimates about the demand of rural population in firewood exist, e.g.  98% of the households in rural area, that means 10,3 million inhabitants, use stoves for heating in which wood is burned (NES, 2007) which would situate the market at the level of 250 million euro value.
While industrial use of biomass may be a powerful tool for addressing a range of environmental problems, e.g. saw-mills wood waste depositing near to the river valleys, or substituting fossil fuels in the atmospheric carbon balance, the strong development of biomass sector raised up sustainability concerns for several social-related issues, not yet addressed in research in Romania.
Sustainable use of the forest biomass is a key concept of current forest management paradigm. However, the sustainability analysis focus mostly on the economic and ecological aspects of biomass production, while a few studies consider also social aspects. Moreover, the patterns of the rural consumption of fuelwood was seldom studied in an European context (Arabatzis et al., 2012; Nybakk et al., 2013; Bouriaud et al., 2013).

Research question
The research project BiomaS aims at identifying which are the social sustainability outcomes of the current model of resource appropriation in woody biomass production and utilization in North-Eastern Romania.

The specific objectives are:

• O1: Analyse the curent model in place for woody biomass appropriation
  
• O2. Analyze the resource attributes in relation with the demand for biomass
  
• O3. Assess the social sustainability of the current model of resource allocation

Methodology

The research aims at implementing an interdisciplinary approach for assessing the sustainability of the forest biomass production within the current legal frame and socio-economic conditions. The Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (Ostrom et al., 1994; Ostrom, 2011) will be used to link conceptual elements of the biomass system of production, e.g. resource, rule-in-use, community, with policy and economic arena where changes towards more socially sustainable system are expected to come from (Figure 1).