Future transitions for the bioeconomy towards sustainable development and a climate-neutral economy - Modelling needs to integrate all three aspects of sustainability

This report analyses the existing capacity and needs for bioeconomy modelling to integrate all three dimensions of sustainability (economic, social, environmental) and provides recommendations for developing new and improved models that are better suited to assist foresight activities and policy making related to the targeted transformation.There are already several models and recent extensions to support the analysis of key policy issues. Part of the recommendations therefore focus on extensions of the existing modelling capacity, to close identified gaps within currently existing economic structures and their adaptation to policy interventions. Another set of recommendations focuses on the application of so-called emerging modelling approaches, which can close gaps that cannot be addressed by extending existing models. These gaps concern changing economic structures on the supply side and behavioural patterns on the consumption side, which are required to be captured to understand the long-term dimensions of the targeted transformation. The capacity of emerging modelling approaches to analyse the effects of agents’ heterogeneity in decision making, fundamental pattern changes like the overcoming of lock-ins, as well as socio-economic and environment system interactions, makes them interesting for bioeconomy modelling.