Biomonitor, monitoring the Bioeconomy

From June 7 to 8, Wageningen University will be chairing the kick-off meeting of the BioMonitor project at the Albert Borschette Congress Center in Brussels. Eighteen European partners coming from public and private research institutions will work together to establish a sustainable data and modelling framework for the bioeconomy that is effective and robust for stakeholders to use in order to come up with up-to-date and relevant policies on emerging bio-based products.

BioMonitor is a project funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Biotech programme. It provides an opportunity for all 18 partners from 10 countries to offer an effective and robust methodology catered to the people working in statistical and custom offices, laboratories, policy makers and industries all over the world. The project will start officially with its kick-off meeting in Brussels on June 7 and June 8, which will be led by Wageningen University.

The BioMonitor project wants to address the information gap and mismatch of emerging innovative industries coming from the chemical and materials sectors that deal with the production of bio-based intermediate and end-products. It also wants to resolve the lack of indicators needed to quantify the bioeconomy’s economic, environmental and social impacts in the EU and its Member States.

“We urgently need a set of reliable tools to measure the size and developments of the EU bioeconomy,” as pointed out by Justus Wesseler of the Wageningen University, who is the coordinator of the BioMonitor project. “The BioMonitor project will assist the EU leaders in assessing to what extent the UN sustainable development goals are met, and what measures could help the rural development in the EU.”

Indeed, these will be achieved by developing an integrated quantitative kit composed of a comprehensive bioeconomy database, an all-around data analysis and modelling toolbox, and a platform tailored according to professional stakeholders’ needs. Various training methods and communication tools will be provided to guide them and to guarantee the uptake of these new set of bioeconomy standards over a longer period of time.

During the meeting, representatives of the European Commission and some partners from the BioMonitor consortium will have an open panel discussion to be supervised by Justus about, “Bioeconomy toward Sustainable Development”.