As global challenges such as climate change, global health, and water scarcity continue to increase in complexity, a sustainable bioeconomy, powered by regional biological sources, offers a promising solution. However, this transition comes with its own set of risks. Increased demand for agriculture and forestry, if not properly evaluated, can lead to problems such as rising greenhouse gas emissions, decreased biodiversity, and depleted water sources.
Current methodologies, designs, and policies fall short of the systems perspective required for a successful transition away from fossil resources. Thus DESTINY was born, an initiative designed to tackle this gap by optimizing value chains, delivering maximum sustainability, and increasing applications in real-life scenarios.
Is sustainable intensification an oxymoron? Or is there a way to create a sustainable and efficient agri-food supply chain? This question is being explored by one of the PhD students, Susan Alvarado Cummings. With her background in the Biobased and Circular Economy, she aims to design a supply chain that maximizes overall benefits across environmental, economic, and socio-ethical parameters.
Sustainable intensification emerged as a way to maintain high yields while reducing the environmental footprint. However, lowering the environmental footprint does not always account for the complexities of the food system, and the trade-offs involved in these decisions are rarely quantified. Therefore, an optimal supply chain design is needed, one that assesses and quantifies trade-offs across different aspects of the system. One that considers the valorization of food waste into high value products, the multifunctionality of agrifood supply chains, and that includes animal welfare and not just the environmental footprint. This project will focus on addressing this critical need.
The bioeconomy transition will also require policy interventions. This aspect is being explored by Rose Aloyce Qamara with her background in policy analysis she aims to create an assessment framework for bioeconomy governance, describe the evolution of different bioeconomy systems and identify different governance solutions for different bioeconomy systems.
Governance frameworks help balance economic growth with environmental protection, ensuring fair access to resources, equitable benefits, and social inclusion. These approaches guide policy development, foster collaboration between public and private sectors, and address ethical concerns in biotechnology, agriculture, and renewable energy. However, understanding governance solutions is a complex process.
Therefore, coherent governance solutions are needed in addressing regional bioeconomy governance. The study aims to develop a comparative analysis of the governance solutions for regional bioeconomy systems and the identification of innovative solutions to assess to bioeconomy systems based on countries involved in the project, in particular using Italy and Germany as case studies; The analysis will be based on an original framework and primary data collected during the project and will focus, on innovation systems and biomass production.
