Exploring options to resolve land and sea use competition

A sustainable and circular bioeconomy relies on a management guaranteeing the preservation and restoration of biodiversity and healthy ecosystems while providing sufficient biomass for the production of food, materials and energy required for peoples' wellbeing. On one hand we see a decline of biodiversity, a gap in ecosystem carbon sequestration or lacking capacity of the biosphere to absorb pollutants; on the other hand the increasing competition of biomass use between food, materials, and energy indicates a potential sustainable biomass gap in Europe[[ The European Biomass Puzzle — European Environment Agency (europa.eu)]]. Projections indicate that this sustainable biomass gap could be exacerbated in the decades to come. To anticipate potential areas of conflicts and to develop holistic and coherent policy packages on biomass and land and sea uses requires tools that can inform policy makers how environmental, economic and social objectives can be met based on the available sustainable biomass, in order to close the biomass gap while assessing and minimizing the environmental, economic and wider societal impact and considering social justice and equality aspects on local, regional and EU levels. The Joint Research Centre is working on a deliberation tool on 'Integrated Bioeconomy Land Use Assessment' (IBLUA)[[Integrated bioeconomy land use assessment: Land system responses to bioeconomy-related policies | Knowledge for policy (europa.eu)]] at the European level. However, an assessment at such aggregate rough level is not sufficient for informing policies at national and regional level. This topic is encouraged to build upon the JRC’s tools developed for the European-level approach and assessment to improve context-specific deliberation tools that can assess social and economic outcomes of policies at regional level and support regional policy makers in finding best context-specific policies related to land and sea and biomass.

Successful proposals are expected to:

• develop tools (including methodologies and processes) for national and regional policy- and decision-makers to carry out integrated bioeconomy land and sea assessments, with the objective to minimize the ‘land/sea footprint’ and provide different land and sea biomass uses solutions, considering their feasibility, viability, and societal desirability (e.g. region specific). The assessment shall consider natural, semi-natural, and managed (agricultural and forestry, fisheries and aquaculture) ecosystems and the impacts of land/sea use on ecosystem conditions, biodiversity and supply of ecosystem services and interlinkages, considering the System of Environmental Economic Accounting set of indicators and the JRC's EU-wide ecosystem condition assessment;
• assess and develop integrated and coherent policy objectives to improve land and sea biomass use in national and regional contexts, considering the inclusive approaches to developing a wide range of policy narratives (e.g. objectives) pursued by the JRC in the EU-level assessment (i.e. IBLUA). The different narratives described qualitatively will be quantitatively represented (e.g. reporting relevant social, economic and environmental indicators) in the deliberation tool, which should be able to capture different configurations of land and sea and biomass use, including dietary needs, energy uses, bio-based products expansion, and carbon farming; considering the challenges to land/sea ownership (e.g. private vs public) and the options stem from the tool to resolve them;
• demonstrate how the deliberation tool could be implemented in a network of regions covering different socio-economic situations and climate/ecological zones in the EU and associated countries to improve just and sustainable land/sea management, food security and circular biomass uses.

The participation of the JRC in the project is encouraged to ensure that the approach proposed is compatible with the bioeconomy working streams of the Knowledge Centre for Bioeconomy and with the various JRC’s tools and methodologies developed for the EU bioeconomy assessment.

Proposals should include a dedicated task, appropriate resources and a plan on how they will collaborate with other projects funded under this topic and ensure complementarities with relevant activities carried out under other initiatives in Horizon Europe, including the Horizon Europe Mission “A Soil Deal for Europe”, and seek synergies with other EU programmes and funding instruments.

Proposals should build on the findings of the “Global Resources Outlook[[ Global Resources Outlook 2024 | UNEP - UN Environment Programme]]” 2024 from the International Resource Panel. Proposals are encouraged to consider, where relevant, the services offered by European research infrastructures. The catalogue of European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) research infrastructures portfolio can be browsed from ESFRI website.