Abstract
AbstractEconomic sectors relying on the use of biological organisms, processes, and principles to create products and services are expected to experience accelerated growth due to innovation in the bioeconomy. Associated benefits and risks for sustainable development are increasingly subject to societal debate. We compiled expectation patterns from a global survey with bioeconomy experts and a systematic literature review identifying areas of consensus and controversy across dimensions of the sustainable development goals (SDG). Positive connotations dominated in both expert opinions and the scientific literature, but the level of consensus varied across sectors of the bioeconomy and in relation to applied methodological approaches (scientific literature) and type of employer (experts). In both sources, we found more differentiated views on potential impacts of bioeconomic development pathways on sustainability in more established bioeconomy‐related discourses, which indicates that expectation patterns in more recent fields of bio‐based innovation are subject to early “hype cycle” dynamics. Our findings suggest the need to systematically mainstream sustainability risk appraisals across relevant application contexts in technology impact assessments for the bioeconomy.
Highlights
The impacts of climate change, unprecedented rates of biodiversity loss, population growth and an ever-growing need for food, energy, and materials, are daunting global challenges of the Anthropocene
While we found many studies focusing on health and wellbeing (SDG3, n = 121), clean water and sanitation (SDG 6, n = 102), life below water (SDG14, n = 102), and life on land (SDG15, n = 102), we found very few looking at the impacts of bioeconomy on peace justice and strong institutions (SDG 16, n = 3), reduced inequalities (SDG 10, n = 10), industry, innovation and infrastructure (SDG9, n = 16), and quality education (SDG4, n = 19)
We find positive expected outcomes to dominate especially in the literature, but the reliability of evidence and agreement among experts and scientific literature vary considerably across sectors of the bioeconomy and sustainable development goals (SDG) dimensions
Summary
The impacts of climate change, unprecedented rates of biodiversity loss, population growth and an ever-growing need for food, energy, and materials, are daunting global challenges of the Anthropocene. Transformations refers to a web of processes of change created and fueled through the coevolution of economic, ecological, cultural, technological, political, and institutional developments at different scales involving numerous actors on multiple societal levels (Förster et al, 2020) This has conceptual and practical links to the field of applied bioeconomy. Dependent on specific innovation; inbreeding with wild relatives; negative impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services; health risks, for example, due to use of pesticides; increasing competition for smallholder farmers; unequal access to education, knowledge, and technology; concentration of benefits on high-tech. Unintended market effects by using previously underutilized resource having negative ecological impacts; health and ecological issues, for example, through accumulation of harmful substances such as heavy metals in organisms and soils
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