Straw, husks, stalks, branches and sawdust have long been treated as the leftovers of farming and forestry, burned in fields or left to rot. A new study says that stream of material could do real work in the energy system. It also finds that the payoff depends heavily on where in the world you happen to live.
The paper, published open access in Nature Communications on 6 October 2026, is titled “Prospects and complexities in sustainability impacts of global residue-based bioenergy deployment”. It concludes that using agricultural and forestry residues for bioenergy could advance several of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The size of the benefit varies substantially by region and by socioeconomic scenario.
The team is led by Chaoshuo Liu, Junnian Song, Wei Yang and Jingzheng Ren. Their colleagues are at Jilin University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, University College London and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The work looks at deployment under socioeconomic and climate scenarios running to 2060.
Canada comes out on top. According to the study, energy from deploying residue-based bioenergy there could meet nearly 20 percent of the country’s energy demand. The flip side is that most lower-income regions would struggle to achieve meaningful sustainability benefits from the same resources.
The appeal of residues is simple. Unlike dedicated energy crops, which need land that might otherwise grow food or support natural ecosystems, residues are byproducts of farming and forestry that already exist. Using them can cut waste and open-burning emissions and displace fossil fuels.
The resource itself is not new to researchers. A widely cited 2010 analysis in Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change estimated that the world produces residue biomass that could be sustainably harvested into over 50 exajoules of energy a year, with China, the United States and India holding the most. An exajoule is a billion billion joules, roughly the annual energy use of a mid-sized country. A more recent global model from LUT University in Finland, covering waste and residues to 2050, put total sustainable bioenergy potential at 87 to 119 exajoules a year, with crop residue the largest share.
Those earlier studies mostly counted how much material exists. This one asks what happens when it is used, and for whom. The answer is uneven. A tonne of straw can be a heating fuel in one country and an unreachable asset in another that lacks the collection networks, plants and money to turn it into energy.
The study’s scenarios stretch to 2060, a long way off. The nearest fixed date is the paper itself, already online and free to read on the Nature Communications site since 6 October.
