Abstract
The European Union (EU) envisions a shift towards a bioeconomy to address challenges such as reducing dependence on non-renewable resources, managing natural resources sustainably and food security. As a result, biomass will become an increasingly important resource in the bioeconomy. This will require careful and sustainable management especially because biomass comes from a wide variety of economic sectors and is governed by different policies. The bioeconomy will, therefore, require coherence between many different policy domains. However, little is known how policy goals in these domains interact and how these interactions may play out in different contexts. Hence, this study aims to assess coherence between bioeconomy and agro-food policies by assessing the interactions between bioeconomy and agro-food goals (i.e. trade-offs, synergies) as well as revealing knowledge gaps. Utilising qualitative content analysis, a survey and focus groups, we find that bioeconomy policy goals and agro-food policy goals are largely considered to be consistent, when considering coherence scores only, and that synergies outweigh trade-offs, both in quantity and in strength. However, all bioeconomy policy domains show some trade-offs with agro-food policy. We furthermore find disagreement (i.e. range of scores) and uncertainty in scientific knowledge-base, particularly concerning waste and bio-based industry. Disagreement surrounds the feasibility of some policy goals, such as decoupling economic growth from the environment. We conclude that a shift towards a bioeconomy will have to acknowledge the interactions between different policy goals across the different sectors and avoid ‘silo-thinking’. This can be achieved through addressing vagueness in policies and allowing integrated policies to embrace uncertainty.
Highlights
Humans use biomass for multiple purposes, such as the production of food, livestock feed, bioenergy and bio-based materials
We focus on horizontal and external coher ence, which is the examination of coherence across one administrative scale (EU) but across different policy domains
This raises the question, what does policy coherence mean in the context of this study? We argue that assessing policy coherence is not as straightforward as matching policy goals with sci entific evidence (International Council for Science, 2017; McCollum et al, 2018)
Summary
Humans use biomass for multiple purposes, such as the production of food, livestock feed, bioenergy and bio-based materials (e.g. bio-plastics, cellulose fibres, pharmaceuticals). As economies shift to become more bio-based, demands will in crease for bio-based products such as bioplastics, biolubricants and biochemicals (Scarlat et al, 2015) If these trends remain unchanged, it will become increasingly difficult to meet growing demands without increasing pressure on water, land and other natural resources (Muscat et al, 2019). Several studies have so far assessed the potential biomass available and in the future to meet human de mands (Daioglou et al, 2019; Scarlat et al, 2011; Verkerk et al, 2019) These studies often focus on only one or two biomass uses (for food, feed, fuel, materials etc.) without considering systems-level con nections between food-systems, energy-systems and other bio-based systems (e.g. forestry). This results in science recommending either piecemeal or inconsistent solutions that lead to several trade-offs (Muscat et al, 2019)
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