The health and well-being of society are deeply rooted in land use. Terrestrial ecosystems sustain us through biomass provision, contributing end-use goods of food, materials and energy as well as basic intermediaries such as animal feed. They provide essential regulatory processes, including flood mitigation, soil erosion control, pollination and climate change mitigation, among others. Regarding intangibles, the scientific literature widely recognises the positive effects of human interaction with nature, understanding it as a key contributor to mental and emotional well-being. Indeed, there is no healthy human life without healthy terrestrial ecosystems.

Land systems are defined as the result of the interaction of human activity with nature. Although we take the current state of the landscapes around us for granted in Europe, this is actually the result of centuries of co-evolution between human societies and terrestrial ecosystems. In a continuous, dynamic interaction, human activity and environmental factors have shaped the landscapes we live in today: different forms of governance, land ownership and tenure, socioeconomic systems, climatic variations and a further infinite amount of intentional and unintentional path dependencies have left their marks in the landscape we live in today.

Land-based ecosystems in Europe are mostly transformed and, like all other Earth system components, have been substantially impacted through the post-WWII Great Acceleration. Nowadays, EU bioeconomy-related policies may impact land use in different ways depending on their specific objectives and targets. Either they may directly focus on the protection of wilderness and biodiversity conservation, or enhancement of the carbon sequestration potential of land-based processes, or they may indirectly influence land by promoting the use of land-based biomass to reach climate, energy or other economic targets. In even broader terms, EU institutions and policies affect land systems by influencing cultural and social norms, as well as defining the socioeconomic systems in place (e.g. property and ownership structures). Agriculture and food production systems in particular are major drivers of land use. Additionally, in a globalized world, EU consumption patterns largely affect land systems in third countries.

In this project we adopt an approach of societal metabolism to assess land use, including society as a fundamental part of metabolic processes governing production, management and use of biomass. Land systems are therefore broadly framed as social-ecological systems (SES): complex adaptive systems whereby the outcomes of human actions on societies and ecosystems, including policy-driven actions, are intrinsically difficult to anticipate.

Ecosystem condition and services

Social-ecological assessment

Extended peer community and deliberation

Ecosystem condition and services

The concept of ecosystem condition and services was identified as the reference framework to define the safe operating space for terrestrial ecosystems, that is, to remain in good condition while providing biomass flows and the full range of services.

Biomass extraction affects ecosystems by modifying their compositional, functional, and structural state, and therefore their condition or health. In forest ecosystems, close-to-nature management for biomass extraction tends to deliver forest ecosystems in better condition than more intensive systems.

Biomass extraction within the safe operating space for terrestrial ecosystems can help in maintaining and improving the condition of our ecosystems and guarantee the delivery of regulating and cultural ecosystems services to society, hence contributing to the human well-being.

Analysis of synergies and trade-offs between ecosystem extent, condition, services, and biomass flows will be required for the assessment of the safe operating space. This will vary across archetypical ecological homogeneous areas that differ in terms of drivers of change (i.e. biomass flows), ecological characteristics and condition, and supply of ecosystem services.

Tackling the biodiversity and climate crisis requires maintaining and achieving good ecosystem condition as called for in the proposal for a Nature Restoration Law. Moreover, tracking changes in ecosystem extent, condition and services is also foreseen in the proposal for a legal module on ecosystem accounts. Along these lines, the New Forest Strategy to 2030 recognises the multifunctional role of forests while acknowledging the key role of foresters in ensuring that all forest ecosystems are restored, resilient and adequately protected.

Social-ecological assessment

The components of social-ecological systems are often analysed in isolation. When estimating the environmental pressures generated by a specific technology or sector, for instance, the deep connections that technology or sector has with social practices in the broader social-economic system are routinely ignored.

Mobilised within an appropriate framework of accounting, however, many of the same indicators that are used in reductionist systems can be integrated into a more holistic perspective capable of capturing the effects of bioeconomy-related policies across the entire social-ecological realm. A holistic perspective, as such, entails understanding the interconnected metabolic capacities of the EU’s land system, including the capacity of the economic workforce and infrastructure to provide for changing demands on primary sectors such as agriculture and forestry, the capacity of local ecosystems to accommodate changing demands without undesirable degradation, the capacity of the society to regulate (such as through tailored and coherent policies) their demand for extractive flows in order to counter other demands deemed more relevant for human wellbeing, and so forth.

The need for an integrative methodological approach capable of handling the various dimensions and scales of analysis prescribed by a holistic perspective, as such, emerges. The Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM) accounting framework has been purposefully developed for the task. This framework can be used in a diagnostic capacity to assess the feasibility (i.e. compatibility with ecological context), viability (i.e. compatibility with economic constraints) and desirability (i.e. compatibility with the social fabric) of the current bioeconomy state and the purposefulness of the policy environment. Concurrently, it can be used in an anticipatory capacity to explore possible future social-ecological configurations, employing ‘what-if’ storylines. Such storylines explore divergent system configurations — hypothesising forced and discretionary adjustments to political, societal (technical, economic, social) and ecosystem parameters — and evaluate resulting pressures and impacts. Interpretation of the ‘what-if’ storylines in terms of adjustments to model parameters will test and illustrate the approach as well as explore and help decision-makers understand the boundaries of the bioeconomy option space. These storylines will be defined in a participatory setting.

Extended peer community and deliberation

Concurrently to the exploration of the links between policies and pressures on land systems, the Commission’s Competence Centre on Participatory and Deliberative Democracy will be involved in the task dedicated to narrative analysis and, together with all other project participants, in the identification of the most relevant ‘what-if’ storylines from the policy landscape.

Within this project, narrative analysis corresponds to the critical unpacking of selected and pivotal EU policy documents, currently framing the EU bioeconomy in distinct terms by building on specific diagnoses and assumptions, both of the present and the future to be. This task is carried out by the JRC in collaboration with external experts.

The identification of narratives will be validated and, where necessary, further expanded by means of semi-structured interviews with a selected group of EU policy officers and experts in the field. Such activity will lead to a first draft of the existing option space for visions of the bioeconomy.

In the spirit of Post-Normal Science and to democratise the research inquiry, such first characterisation of the option space together with ‘what-if’ storylines and results from the narrative-analysis, as well as of the assessment of policies on land, will be presented, collectively discussed and challenged during a co-creation workshop, where EU policy officers and stakeholders, reflecting different physical and cultural geographies, as well as epistemologies of land, will be invited to participate. Participants of the workshop representing an ‘extended community of actors’ will co-produce the final ‘what-if’ policy storylines, evaluating the plausibility and desirability of narratives, to be later used as inputs in the deliberation tool.

The co-creation workshop will enable the emergence of so-called ‘leverage points’ in the field of bioeconomy (e.g. thematic, geographical), potentially leading to the identification of meaningful case studies and of land-users to invite to join the research process. The evolution of the project towards greater transdisciplinarity will greatly enhance the quality of knowledge for policy produced within this research project.

The deliberation tool will consist both in a guidance on how to apply the process and an actual tool developed in the project to facilitate deliberation of policy choices at EU and Member State levels, as well as in practical case studies in which the outcomes of each storyline, or system configuration, will be evaluated and summarized in an interactive output dashboard. The process of storyline evaluation and dashboard creation is a delicate one, as it implies interpretation and synthesis of many non-commensurable variables expressed in non-equivalent descriptive domains: dashboards need to incorporate indicators related to the environmental, techno-economic, and social aspects of each configuration. Outputs need to be comprehensive, salient, and robust, but at the same time practical. In the participatory spirit of the project, the design of this dashboard(s) cannot be solely driven by scientific experts, but rather must be discussed, tested, and validated with the extended peer-community.

Spirit of project

Foundational Framings & Approaches

This project expands past business-as-usual framings and methods, drawing on several innovative approaches to bioeconomy analysis.

Leverage points

One reason for society’s limited success in transforming toward sustainability in many countries is the predominant focus on specific policies with limited breadth of impact. Leverage points, in the context of sustainability and bioeconomy research, refer to strategic places within a complex system where a small shift or intervention can produce disproportionately large and transformative changes. They are points of power or vulnerability within systems. By leveraging these specific points, decision makers and the extended peer community at large can effectively drive the system toward more sustainable outcomes. Identifying and acting on leverage points can amplify desired impacts, making them essential tools for achieving meaningful progress in sustainability and bioeconomy transitions.

Post-normal science

A scientific approach tailored to handling issues where facts are uncertain, values are in dispute, stakes are high, and decisions are urgent (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1993). Post-normal science finds itself particularly relevant in science for policy and calls for the inclusion of the extended peer community. This latter consists not merely of persons with some form or other of institutional accreditation, but rather of all those with a desire to participate in the resolution of the issue. The post-normal science paradigm informs this project in many ways, e.g. from mapping of policy narratives to the Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM) accounting framework.

Complex systems theory

Complexity is a property used to describe systems which, due to their nature, demand multiple non-equivalent descriptions (Rosen, 1977). Complex systems are non-mechanical (non-deterministic) and do not have a single largest model. Social-ecological systems are one type of complex system, considered in this project. If a system is not complex it is simple (which says little to the fact of whether or not the system is complicated). Complexity theory and the acknowledgment of the existence of complexity in relation to ‘wicked problems’ motivates our approach to problem resolution.

Quantitative storytelling

A process used to explore the option space of the metabolic pattern of social-ecological systems, generating contingent representations of systems of interest (different states of the systems) and validating the environmental feasibility, economic viability and social desirability of those contingencies. The approach is primarily used to falsify narrative sets (storylines), toward increasingly robust and quality visions of societal futures.

Societal metabolism

Societies, just as biological organisms, have metabolic profiles and homeostasis requirements. The sectors of society are as the organs of a biological organism —  stable processors demanding certain quantities and qualities of material and energy flows from their ecological context (e.g. the biosphere) in order to reproduce their identity. In like manner, heterodox economist Georgescu-Roegen (1971) understood the purpose of the economy not as ‘the production of goods and services’ but rather the material reproduction of the identity of the societal whole toward, ultimately, the living of a good life. Georgescu-Roegen is, furthermore, often attributed with coining the term ‘bioeconomy’, a portmanteau of ‘biological’ and ‘economy’, referring for him to an economy compatible with biological limits. Societal metabolism is one approach by which the various biological limits to be respected by society can be understood in practical terms: biophysical flows at specific qualities and rates in relation to the fulfilment of specific sectoral functions and reproduction of the societal whole. In this sense, in terms of contribution to the EU Bioeconomy Strategy, this approach is moving forward from ‘understanding the bioeconomy’ through to ‘bioeconomy in practice’ (see Progress report of the EU Bioeconomy Strategy).

Relevant policy documents

• EU Bioeconomy Strategy 2018
• EU Bioeconomy Strategy Progress report 2022
• European Green Deal Communication 2019
• Sustainable Carbon Cycles communication 2021
• Proposal for a Nature Restoration Law 2023
• Proposal for a legal module on ecosystem accounts 2022
• Horizon Europe - Work Programme 2023-2024, Food, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment

Relevant scientific projects and documents

• MAGIC-NEXUS project
• Uncomfortable Knowledge Hub
• An accounting framework recognising the complexity of the nexus (MuSIASEM)
• Multi-scale integrated analysis of societal and ecosystem metabolism (MuSIASEM: Theoretical concepts and basic rationale
• Competence Centre on Participatory and Deliberative Democracy
• INCA project (Integrated System of Natural Capital Accounts)
• EU initiative on Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystems and their Services
• Guidance for the mapping and assessment of ecosystem condition
• Accounting for forest condition in Europe based on an international statistical standard
• International Statistical Standard on Ecosystem Accounts
• JRC Bioeconomy Monitoring System
• JRC Science for Policy Report - Trends in the EU bioeconomy
• JRC External report - Exploring new visions for a sustainable bioeconomy