Title:
Monitoring Material Flows of a Bioeconomy Region
Author(s):
Hildebrandt, J., Siebert, A., Thrän, D., Bezama, A.
Document(s):
Paper
Abstract:
Production of high added value products from locally available wood resources, thus creating regional co-benefits for society, as well as positively influencing local environmental and socio-economic conditions, are decisive elements in the implementation of sustainable wood based bioeconomy strategies. As a matter of fact, the successful implementation of such bioeconomy strategies will require more complex integrative processes, which go beyond the conventional “industrial ecology” approaches. It will require extended cross-sectoral cooperations between the different associated industrial stakeholder groups, as well as the implementation of energy and material flow synergies to enable the production of products and by-products in cascade and coupled production schemes. These sustainable strategies also require that the priorities and concerns of regional stakeholder groups be acknowledged and incorporated in aligning the goals for sustainable production within wood-based bioeconomy regions. However, assessing and monitoring such integrative systems involves several challenges. Establishing operational monitoring systems must include the evaluation of the whole supply chain and process networks associated with the characteristic products of the evaluated region. Moreover, the assessment should be based on a detailed picture of the regional material flow systems, complemented with the monitoring of stakeholder preferences and priorities. They must also be able to include temporal elements, helping to identify the opportunities and risks of emerging cross-sectoral product options. To date no such integrative assessment methods exist in the literature. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present based on the practical example of a case study region the assessment of the sustainability level of wood-based bioeconomy networks, applying an integrated methodology for Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA).
Keywords:
sustainability goals, priority areas, bioeconomy regions, indicator sets
Topic:
Biomass Policies, Markets and Sustainability
Subtopic:
Resource efficient bioeconomy and social opportunities
Event:
25th European Biomass Conference and Exhibition
Session:
4AV.1.22
Pages:
1566 - 1574
ISBN:
978-88-89407-17-2
Paper DOI:
10.5071/25thEUBCE2017-4AV.1.22
Price:
FREE
