A primary assessment of the EU regions' transition towards bioeconomy

Objective:The European Union (EU) identifies the deployment of bioeconomy as the key factor to achieve a sustainable future. This is expected to be realized through the decarbonization of the economy and the replacement of all resources with renewables ones. The importance is also acknowledged on the EU Member State level, as there are currently ten EU member states with dedicated bioeconomy strategies and seven that are in the process of developing theirs. However, there is still more to be done on a regional level, because only 28 EU regions have in place their own dedicated bioeconomy strategies and 69 other EU regions are in the process or are implementing strategies in which the bioeconomy is one of the key elements. In any case, it has been highlighted how important and crucial the integration of bioeconomy in regional economies is. The main objective of the study is to assess and promote the transition to bioeconomy on a regional scale by analysing EU regions (NUTS II Level) with a group of selected bio-indicators. The outcome will be a better understanding of bioeconomy at a regional level. Moreover, the proposed tool could be used as a policy instrument to achieve regional development based on the unique characteristics and the comparative advantage of each region. Method: A Multi-Criteria Assessment (MCA) tool is designed and implemented. Specifically, the process that will be followed includes the conduct of an extensive review of the existing world-wide indicators, national frameworks and methodologies based on academic literature, reports, guidelines, and relevant projects. The outcome of this process is a pool-database with the most utilized bioeconomy indicators. Furthermore, these indicators are categorized in economic, social, and environmental groups, reflecting the three pillars of sustainable development. The proposed indicators are eliminated if they do not fulfil specific criteria. The selection criteria will be the meaningfulness and clear meaning i.e., description of an indicator, existence of an indicator in other policy frameworks, data availability, extended geographical coverage, comparability across countries/products or sectors, comparability over time and accessibility of data. Eventually, the final group of the remaining proposed indicators is selected based on data availability and applicability in all EU-regions. Finally, regions are ranked accordingly by using the TOPSIS MCA tool. Results: The selected bioeconomy indicators will be used to assess, initially, the current regional bioeconomy state for the eight countries-members of the consortium of the Horizon 2020 “BIO2REG†project, namely, Germany, Spain, Greece, Belgium, France, Sweden, Czech Republic, and Iceland. This initial assessment will provide the blueprint for revealing the model bioeconomy regions and the potential EU-wide pathways to promote regional bioeconomy. Originality: To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to provide an assessment of NUTS II regions based on bioeconomy- related indicators.