Shaping the future bioeconomy across sectoral, governmental and geographical levels

Project Information

ShapingBio

Grant agreement ID: 101060252

DOI

10.3030/101060252

Project closed

EC signature date 2 June 2022

Start date 1 September 2022

End date 31 August 2025

Funded under

• Food, Bioeconomy Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment

Total cost

€ 3 999 412,50

EU contribution

€ 3 999 412,50

Coordinated by

FRAUNHOFER GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FORDERUNG DER ANGEWANDTEN FORSCHUNG EV
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ShapingBio (Shaping the future bioeconomy across sectoral, governmental and geographical levels)

Reporting period: 2024-03-01 to 2025-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In the light of global challenges (i.e. climate change, increasing depletion of fossil fuel sources), the EU is in need for responsible transition process in bioeconomy towards circularity and sustainability. The future development of different bio-based sectors has a crucial impact and decisive role in achieving a sustainable bioeconomy ecosystem. Currently, however, bioeconomy innovations are hampered by different challenges, such as the fragmentation of, and the presence of sectoral silos, lack of policy coordination and coherence between different levels of governance, and collaboration along new value chains or across sectors, leading to inefficient technology and knowledge transfer, and are obstacles in terms of financial constraints. To master these challenges is a tremendous task for policy makers and other stakeholders, especially since there are major differences be-tween countries, regions and local areas in Europe regarding capabilities, resource endowment and industrial focus. Hence, better coherence and coordination of policy, mutual learning and cooperation between stakeholders from different sectors, countries and stages of bio-based value chains is needed.

The overarching objective of ShapingBio is to strengthen and deploy innovation in bio-based sectors, including food systems, across Europe. Specifically, the CSA aimed to deliver evidence-based information, guidelines, and recommendations that foster better policy alignment as well as supporting and integrating stakeholders in the bio-based sectors.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The following key activities were performed within ShapingBio:
1) Assessment of the relevant information needs of the stakeholders as well as mapping the structures, initiatives and instruments covering key innovation and deployment issues across all EU-regions: ShapingBio provides an in-depth overview of the bioeconomy situation in the EU, including initiatives and instruments their role and purposes in the second half of the project. The results include a report for the EU, a report for the four EU-macro regions and Fact-Sheets for each member state.

2) Deeper analysis of status-quo, best practices, mutual learning across member states for policy & governance, applied R&D and tech transfer, collaboration and financing: Set up of Multi Actor Group for each core topic (4 groups in total) with leading experts across the EU and stakeholder Groups. Those Multi-Actor groups supported to define exact scope and goals and discussed the achieved outputs. For each topic analysis foci (e.g. policy coordination in countries, survey among pilot and demonstration plants) and recommendations were derived in a co-creation process.

3) Elaboration and testing of good practices and guidelines resulting for stakeholder integration as well as promoting knowledge transfer and matchmaking: 23 topic-related networking and matchmaking events as well as the Final Conference were executed in order to promote the dialogue and collaboration among different stakeholders and across the different sectors of the bioeconomy and food-systems and to elaborate a good practice guideline for interactions with stakeholders.

4) Providing Policy Recommendation and follow-up activities: A comprehensive Deliverable of policy and stakeholder actions was elaborated and 4 follow-up workshop with dedicated target-groups were conducted to disseminate recommendations and delineate concrete action points

5) Communication and Disseminatiopn
A large community was reached by a bunch of activities. Among others, 47 events were organized, a website was launched (www.shapingbio.eu) 2 podcasts were launched and a few articles drafted.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The key impact of ShapingBio is strengthening bioeconomy deployment by enabling collaboration and knowledge transfer activities across EU countries, EU macro-regions for the two focal bioeconomy sectors – food and bio-systems.
The uptake of new knowledge generated in the project can enable acceleration of innovation and market deployment actions, by securing behavioural change of target groups, through tuned dissemination and outreach strategies and co-creation processes in a multi-actor approach.
Specifically, ShapingBio has a high focus on policy making and aimed to support the elaboration of the new planned EU Bioeconomy Strategy for 2025 by providing relevant input for various key topics (governance, collaboration, financing, scale-up) and provided many opportunities for discussion between policy makers and the broader community, e.g with contributions of 4 different EC DGs at the Final Conference.