Abstract
There are two main international strategies concerning how to ensure a sustainable environment: one is to develop a globally bio-based economy, or bioeconomy, to meet the increased demand of goods and products to maintain our well-being and to reduce climate change. On the other hand, there is an aim to decrease the negative impacts on nature and natural habitats to conserve and maintain ecosystems and control the loss of biodiversity. There is a trade-off between these two strategies; as we increase the commitment to the bioeconomy by intensifying biomass production, we will simultaneously challenge biodiversity through the increased pressure on, and the utilization of, biological raw materials. Here, we first review and discuss the challenges and opportunities in terrestrial and marine ecosystems for the production of biomass for the bioeconomy. We focus on the trade-offs between economic sustainability on one hand, and environmental sustainability and resilience on the other hand. We conclude with a discussion of the various bioeconomy strategies. Finally, we present a conceptual model on how to sustainably develop the bioeconomies (by introducing the concept of optimizing the economic gain/ecological pain ratio) to be able to manage the biodiversity in a sustainable way.
Highlights
The increasing awareness of the adverse effects of climate change is shifting policymakers’ focus from fossil fuels to renewable biological resources, thereby developing bioeconomies [1,2,3]
Bioeconomy is based on provisioning the ecosystem services comprising nutrition, materials, and energy [1]
Non-timber forest products (NTFPs) are tangible animal and plant products—other than commercial timber and fiber production—that can be collected from the forest [24,25]
Summary
The increasing awareness of the adverse effects of climate change is shifting policymakers’ focus from fossil fuels to renewable biological resources, thereby developing bioeconomies [1,2,3]. The European bioeconomy strategy aims at creating 1 million new jobs in 2030 and supporting the European industry to become more cost efficient and produce new and more sustainable bio-based products. The term “biodiversity,” or biological diversity, has been widely used since the Convention on Biological Diversity in Rio (1992), when it was defined as: The variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine, and other aquatic ecosystems as well as the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems [10] This means that biodiversity can be measured on highly divergent levels, such as diversity of genes, species, habitats, or ecosystem services. We conclude with a conceptual model on how to sustainably manage the bioeconomies (optimize the economic gain/ecological pain ratio) to be able to manage the biodiversity, defined as an ecological biodiversity value
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