Bioregions

Promoting bioregions across Europe-common approaches, monitoring and implementation

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development aims at increasing human wellbeing, prosperity and social justice, while ensuring the lasting protection of the planet and its natural resources. It asks for fundamental changes in the way that our societies produce and consume goods and services in order to secure prosperity, mitigate climate change, reduce waste and pollution and face depletion of fossil and non-renewable materials. The circular bioeconomy, promoted by the recently updated EC strategy (“A sustainable bioeconomy for Europe: strengthening the connection between economy, society and the environment. European Commission, 2018”), is a key element in this societal transformation and European regions have the opportunity and the responsibility to implement, as they can mobilize society in place-based transformational efforts, leverage competitive advantages to make the best of available natural resources in order to satisfy societal demands.

European regions are diverse and they have different natural resources, biomass availability and economic structures. In consequence, bioeconomy takes different shapes in different regions through innovative and tailored combination of biomass production and processing capacities, agro-ecological developments, green infrastructure and nature-based-solutions. Frequently however they face similar challenges and much can be learned from each other’s experiences and approaches.

In this context, this working group session will provide an opportunity to share knowledge and experiences among regions and actors in the policy-science-society interface, while setting up the basis for a common way to develop and implement the bioeconomy in the various regions of Europe. Possible topics to be discussed:

• Establishing/consolidating the Bioregions network
• Monitoring and coordinating the regional implementation of the bioeconomy in Europe
• Good coordination between EU-Member State-Regional levels
• Forests under a climate change context: bioeconomy as a tool for promoting more resilient landscapes to forest fires and other risks. How to best tackle forests’ role in regional bioeconomy strategies?
• Tools for implementation: the coming 2020-2027 CAP policy, Horizon Europe, other funds
• How to integrate the natural capital and the environmental services in the bioeconomy implementation.