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WTO
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Biofuture Platform
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Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB)
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Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)
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OECD
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Global Bioeconomy Council
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The Global Bioenergy Partnership (GBEP)
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UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)
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UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)
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Food and Agriculture Organization
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International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
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UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
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G20, G7
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UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), UN Development Programme (UNDP), UN Environment Programme (UNEP)
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World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)
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International Bioeconomy Forum (IBF)
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Source: Bößner, S., Johnson, F. X. and Shawoo, Z. (2021), ‘Governing the Bioeconomy: What Role for International Institutions?’, Sustainability, 13(1), p. 286, https://doi.org/10.3390/su13010286. With UNIDO added by authors.
Immediate action
Pragmatic entry points need to be found in the current fragmented geopolitical climate to strengthen dialogues and joint commitments among key countries that can enlarge and then drive greater cooperation.
This could happen through different mechanisms, taking an approach to balance what is feasible in existing deliberation forums. For instance, an initial focus can be taken through ‘market and economic’ and ‘knowledge’ centred multilateral forums (see Table 4).
- G7/G20: Momentum from the growing presence of bioeconomy strategies among member countries could be strengthened in the G7 through economic governance and agenda-setting. This has already occurred within the G20, which adopted High Level Principles on the Bioeconomy in September 2024. However, such an approach needs to be complemented by other governance models – as well as private sector involvement – because the G7/G20 forums cannot adopt collective binding rules, and their limited memberships would constrain their effectiveness for wider bioeconomy issues.
- Country coalitions: Looking to the International Renewable Energy Agency’s (IRENA) function in the renewable energy transition, there is space for such an organization to play a similar role in the bioeconomy to act as a platform for international cooperation, and to provide leading analyses on available levers to support sustainable bioeconomy development. Existing efforts could hold promise, such as the Biofuture Platform, which is a 23-country initiative to promote an advanced low-carbon bioeconomy that is sustainable, innovative and scalable.
- Bilateral and trilateral: As a starting point, because many of the significant players with substantial bioresources are also part of the BRICS+ countries, it could be possible to harness some of the existing bilateral and/or trilateral relationships. These could include the current China–Brazil agriculture trade relationship or the forest-economy relationships between Nordic countries and Brazil.
Action area 2. Peer-led initiatives
Facilitate pre-competitive initiatives with large organizations that can shape supply chains across bioeconomy sectors and drive sustainability.
To realize the potential benefits of new means of production, products and uses in bioeconomy sectors that deliver positive environmental outcomes, leading centres for innovation need to come together to speed up discovery and adoption.
Bringing new innovations to scale requires capital and time – often around 25 years. The growth rates of feedstock or bio-based goods and services, such as CLT, can also be lengthy, ranging from seven years in warmer regions like Brazil to 30 plus years in colder temperate countries.
Experiments and innovations are happening within sectors, among different industry players, but stakeholders are not coming together to learn, discuss and understand the implications of this work.
Mixing knowledge and implementation capacity can increase the speed and impact of discoveries and improve the selection and testing process. Pre-competitive collaboration, where usually competing companies collaborate on a shared challenge or opportunity, can also enable risk-sharing that speeds up experimentation and development. R&D and innovation is often competitive as the private sector invests to gain an advantage over rivals. Experiments and innovations are happening within sectors, among different industry players, but stakeholders are not coming together to learn, discuss and understand the implications of this work. These siloes can slow down the rate of distribution of innovations between sectors and may mean that negative impacts and trade-offs when new applications are deployed at scale are not foreseen.
Pathway
There is a requirement for initiatives and partnerships that encourage greater technological collaboration among existing and future private and public sector actors that will dictate the pace and direction of the bioeconomy transition.
Importantly, actors need to be able to collaborate on meeting shared goals without creating unfair competitive advantages or damaging business competitiveness.
There are a few archetypes for peer-led collaborations that could be effective for sustainable bioeconomies:
- R&D and knowledge. There is an opportunity for pre-competitive R&D across novel forest restoration approaches e.g. combining restoration with food production, protecting new species, as well as the development of environmental services markets and traceability. This will also have implications for intellectual property rights, for example over advances in genetic sequencing or development of new varieties of biomass.
- Financial standards and specifications. Connecting natural capital to assets is at the frontier of bioeconomy approaches. There is a lot of ongoing work on standards and specifications, such as through the Task-force for Nature-related Disclosures (TNFD). This is a market-led, science-based and government-supported global initiative that has set guidance for a disclosure framework to act on evolving nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities.
- Cooperative business models between sectors. For example, where industries come together to create a precision genetic engineering system to provide multiple ingredients, such as a genetically modified cocoa plant that could produce chocolate and medicines, and whose waste materials can be used for packaging.
- Demand-side coalitions that lead by example and send strong policy signals of the intent to purchase sustainable bioeconomy goods and services. Lessons can be drawn from initiatives across other sectors such as RE100 (the renewable energy initiative), SteelZero (an initiative for net zero steel industry) and the Global Salmon Initiative.
Across potential new bioeconomy applications, there needs to be aligned investments of a scale large enough to help new technologies and approaches reach maturity and markets.
Immediate actions
Existing initiatives from other sectors offer insight into potential ways to increase collaboration across the diverse sectors and activities of a sustainable bioeconomy:
- Learn from the experiences of the forest industry and its relationship with voluntary standards through movements like the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) or Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC). These multisectoral initiatives provide forums for negotiation on issues around innovation and industry practices related to social and environmental movements. These movements connect major players across supply chains and can help shape the direction of travel to sustainable bioeconomies.
- Enlarge coalitions of end-users of bio-based products to identify and negotiate potential upstream competition for bio-based resources. One possible approach is to build coalitions around specific emerging bio-based goods and services prior to their scale-up. In practice, this could mean bringing together downstream users of CLT, for example, to align on standards and demand robust production that does not exacerbate poor land management or social practices.
- Accelerate funding innovation to support critical technologies across the bioeconomy. The European Circular Bioeconomy Fund (ECBF) was the first venture fund investing in growth-stage companies in the European bioeconomy. The model of supporting businesses with high potential, favourable returns and sustainable impact could be expanded to other regions.
In addition, a priority should be engagement with asset managers. This section of the financial system is beginning to drive financial product innovation in the bioeconomy in recognition of the potential opportunities.
Ultimately, bringing together actors against a backdrop of competitive business models requires trusted intermediaries. Creating global research initiatives that are transdisciplinary by nature but focused on the bioeconomy, which accomplish what the International Energy Agency does for the energy sector, can provide evidence-based analysis on the resource constraints, synergies and trade-offs of innovation adoption and bring together the needed governments, industries and research bodies to navigate these.
Action area 3. Policy and technology coherence
Develop and socialize fit-for-purpose decision-making frameworks that combine policy and technology evidence.
The emergence of new technologies and solutions for bioeconomies is accelerating, bringing with it a complex array of potential social and environmental policy implications.
This is happening at both the national and international levels, where technology advancements spread across borders and can influence – positively or negatively – deployment in other regions, supply chain organization and livelihoods.
Technology and social policy development need to happen together to manage these impacts. This will require decision-makers to combine and collate policy and technology evidence to mitigate risks and manage expectations. While there are good existing approaches that deliver a range of analysis (such as life cycle analyses and integrated assessment models), they do not enable exploration of uncertainties, sensitivities, transparent goals and stakeholder views on trade-offs.
Pathway
Effective policymaking requires consideration of changes to the workforce and environmental resource constraints, trade-offs and synergies in the development of a strategic decision-making process.
Platforms that can bring together international stakeholders – combined with relevant analysis and data that captures transnational impacts of the adoption of new bioeconomy-related technologies – are needed to enhance anticipatory policymaking that prioritizes environmental and social goals.
The current use of analytical models can be strengthened through the input of experts. Principles of robust decision-making should play a key role in this process, where rounds of deliberation among experts inform the questions asked of analytical models as well as the interpretation of results. These processes allow a range of future scenarios to be anticipated – and decision-making can then reflect these.
Strategic decision-makers in the private sector, such as R&D experts and strategy developers, and experts in the public sector, such as specialists in economic policy, must play a role in these deliberations.
Immediate action
Existing groups already working on issues of resource extraction and consumption could streamline the process for bringing evidence and analysis into collaborative decision-making, as occurs in the International Resource Panel.
There could also be an opportunity to improve joint consideration of technological development and social policy in other international forums. For example, the G20 track on the bioeconomy has a pillar on science, technology and innovation for the bioeconomy. In future, these types of science and innovation focused tracks could also explicitly include joint dialogues on social policy.
Navigating and negotiating trade-offs
In the absence of a clear direction of travel and socio-environmental guardrails, bioeconomy transition processes will be patchy and messy, with potentially negative socio-economic and environmental impacts in both the short term and long term.
In the absence of a clear direction of travel and socio-environmental guardrails, bioeconomy transition processes will be patchy and messy, with potentially negative socio-economic and environmental impacts in both the short term and long term.
Identifying the trade-offs, as well as creating mechanisms to manage, negotiate and encourage societal agreements will be necessary so the bioeconomy transition can achieve socio-economic, climate and nature objectives. Navigating natural endowment (such as land and water) and budgetary constraints will be critical to ensure better allocation and distribution of limited resources.
There are already lessons to be learned from the winding down of the coal industry, particularly in relation to managing job losses, reskilling, and the mismatch in timing of renewable jobs and the phase-out of traditional jobs. There are existing mechanisms to minimize the dislocation by providing social protection for impacted workers to reduce livelihood insecurity. As countries implement their own bioeconomy strategies, engaging early and negotiating with the negatively affected industries and their workers will be critical for buy in.
At the same time, as highlighted by the three bioeconomy innovations in the analysis presented in this paper, as more bio-based materials are embedded into the economic system and compete for the same renewable energy, land and natural resources, the more critical it will be for the world to manage this competition to avoid environmental degradation. More importantly, it is vital to ensure that these new materials are in a circular supply chain, otherwise, there will just be more bio-based waste streams.
As countries face budgetary constraints, national governments will need to choose their investments strategically to ensure that their bio-based transition pathways will strengthen their geopolitical position. Having significant bioresources is a clear advantage, but it can still be squandered by ideological infighting or the political capture of governments by current powerful industries, such as fossil fuel sectors, that are in decline.
