Review of approaches and identification of research gaps
Creators: name: Bianchi, Marco
name: Clavel Diaz, Janire
name: Menger, Pierre
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024

description: The goal of achieving a net-zero emission European economy by 2050 demands a shift from linear, fossil-based systems to circular, bio-based systems. This transition is vital for meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and reconciling environmental protection with sustainable growth. However, the complexity of the transition relies on societal transformations, cutting-edge technologies, and multi-actor processes, requiring a new societal and economic framework and policy priorities that align with the European Green Deal. In this context, monitoring systems, modelling techniques and data are key tools to support policy making and facilitate a better understanding of the complexity, trade-offs, and potential pathways to achieve a sustainable transition to a circular bioeconomy.

This report presents the results of the work carried out in SUSTRACK Task 2.1. The task focuses on the review of existing knowledge for monitoring and evaluating the transition to circular biobased systems. More than 130 research items, including scientific articles and reports, were consulted to identify major gaps across indicators and approaches generally used to monitor and evaluate the bioeconomy across the three major policy-level analyses: (i) micro-level (products/processes/companies), (ii) meso-level (city/regions) and (iii) macro-level (World, Europe or countries). Furthermore, the literature review also served to initiate the compilation of a database of existing indicators related to the circular bioeconomy, setting the basis for the monitoring framework to be developed in T2.3.

Important gaps and weaknesses emerged in the reviewed literature with regard to social, economic and environmental sustainability assessment of the bioeconomy, and associated data availability. As an example, the indicators identified in the reviewed literature are unequally distributed among the various societal objectives, sub-topics and policy-level applications. In particular, environmental sustainability topics are addressed the most across both product- and territorial-level analyses, followed by economic and social sustainability aspects. However, environmental indicators appear to be in a somewhat less mature state than socioeconomic indicators, which are generally provided regularly in standard statistics. In fact, data for many indicators are often not collected on a regular basis and data quality is a key problem for the estimation of some indicators, especially for the environmental and social dimensions. Another pending key methodological challenge is the well-known “attribution issue”. This refers to how to clearly attribute the measurement of the indicators to the production and use of biomass and it represents one of the major limitations to correctly modelling bioeconomy at the meso- and/or macro-level. This report also underlines the need for a more comprehensive assessment of economic sustainability. Common economic indicators are not thought to inform on sustainability issues and a thriving bio-based business model may present trade-offs with other sustainability objectives. In this context, one-way forward to soundly assess bioeconomy might be the integration of externalities through monetisation. These are just a few of the many knowledge gaps examined in this report.

Finally, based on the identified knowledge gaps, the report provides a list of recommendations to advance bioeconomy monitoring and evaluation at the different policy-levels. These recommendations will serve to analyze the case studies in WP3, and a selection of these research gaps will be addressed in T2.2 for further development.