Showcase
Integrated Bioeconomy Land Use Assessment (IBLUA)
This is our most recent project (2023 - 2025). Many details are contained in this website.
More details will come soon when we begin to publish documents on our epistemic and methodological approach.
Exploring new visions for the EU bioeconomy
This was a special project, born from the idea that our current predicament and polycrisis cannot be tackled, let alone solved, applying the same perspectives and solutions which have caused these crises.
I simply edited this report which contains contributions from a Workshop organized in Bruxelles in November 2022, where fantastic speakers gave fantastic talks. This report tries to capture them and frame them within the conversation on a new EU Bioeconomy strategy.
The main message of the report, including a critique of the current state but also a possible alternative, can be summarized as:
Scholars have highlighted how narratives surrounding the EU Bioeconomy have predominantly embraced a “Green Growth” perspective, centred around economic growth, technological innovation, and anthropocentric values, largely ignoring the social and justice dimensions, as well as not questioning the role, relations, and responsibilities of humans in the web of life. These dominant framings are increasingly contested, though, because they have failed to produce the social and ecological outcomes desired. This report introduces perspectives which have been under-represented in the Bioeconomy discourse and integrates them into an alternative vision for a “green, just and sufficient bioeconomy”. This vision places environmental sustainability and social equity at its core, regardless of economic growth; has an inclusive and participatory perspective; care, respect, and reciprocity for and with other humans and non-humans are core values; technology is important to deliver on the green and just objectives, but ethical considerations for new technologies are openly debated.
How can relational, decolonial and feminist approaches inform the EU Bioeconomy?
The work in the report above was the inspiration for a Commentary lead by Dr. Ramcilovic-Suominen, where we explore even more in depth the root causes of the issues with the current EU Bioeconomy policymaking and we identify three main issues: i) Anthropocentric worldview; ii) Myth of green growth; iii) Neocolonial and imperialist attitudes.
We then compiled a list of 11 action points (as in the figure on the right), along with associated examples and suggestions, for decisionmakers and researchers alike, to explore and consider alternative imaginaries associated with the bioeconomy project.
The supporting material of the Commentary includes the full list of tangible actions. These can be considered almost as a checklist for decisionmakers in assessing whether their interventions are actually enabling new imaginaries to emerge.
Forest bioenergy climate and biodiversity impacts
In this project we looked at forest bioenergy pathways to identify trade-offs between climate change mitigation and local biodiversity or ecosystem condition.
The win-win and lose-lose solutions identified are in the figure below and described in the report we produced for the JRC, and in the paper available below.
Click on the button below to see all the relevant outputs of this project 👇
1-s2.0-S1364032122001058-main-2.pdf
Qualitative assessment of the archetypical pathways indicating climate and biodiversity impacts. Dark blue symbols represent pathways referring to ‘logging residues removal’ intervention, green symbols refer to pathways for ‘afforestation’, and gold symbols refer to ‘conversion to plantation’ interventions. Uncertainty ranges are placed where payback time for carbon emissions could not be placed within a single one of the defined levels. The position of the interventions within each quadrant is arbitrary.
The role of scientists in policy advice
In winter 2021 we were asked to write a commentary for the journal One Earth.
It was a great opportunity to reach an audience beyond our usual target community of bioenergy/bioeconomy. We decided to share some of the lessons learned in our work at the boundary between the scientific community and the policymakers in the European Commission.
The paper can be downloaded here. My two main takeaways from this paper:
The word 'sustainability' has become meaningless (if not outright counterproductive) unless carefully defined and associated to an operational vision and targets.
Science is a social endeavour and every scientific result embeds the worldview and beliefs of the authors. We criticize using scientific authority as a weapon to stifle dialog (‘‘The science says.’’), and suggest one accepts that the evidence science produces is inextricably conditional to value choices. Moral alignments, especially concerning the human-nature relationship, should be declared openly in our scientific publications. This would favor dialog over hostility and inclusivity over exclusivity, and it would support policymakers in incorporating a broader spectrum of knowledge, and consequently expanding the solution space at their disposal.
1-s2.0-S2590332221007314-main.pdfMonitoring the EU Bioeconomy
Within the EU Bioeconomy Strategy, we are designing a Monitoring system to assess the progress towards a sustainable and circular EU Bioeconomy.
We have designed a conceptual framework to capture multiple aspect of the sustainability of the bioeconomy. We are now filling the framework with the appropriate indicators and we are studying new tools and approaches to provide a holistic sustainability assessment.
You can find the description of the framework in this report and paper, and by clicking the button you can access the Dashboard of the official monitoring system.
In winter 2021 we also published a joint report FAO - JRC with a Guidance on how to design bioeconomy monitoring systems at country or macro-regional level.
Our first assessment on the Trends in the EU bioeconomy was published in 2023, and a new updated assessment was released in 2024.
Conceptual framework defining a sustainable and circular EU Bioeconomy. The framework is composed of three hierarchical levels: 1) the overarching objectives set by the strategy, 2) normative criteria defining how each objective can be achieved, and 3) key components, reflecting more specific aspects within each criterion.
Default values for solid and gaseous fuels in the EU Renewable Energy Directive (Annex VI)
I was the leading scientist designing and calculating the default GreenHouse Gas (GHG) emission values for solid and gaseous bioenergy pathways which are presented in Annex VI of the Recast Renewable Energy Directive (EU Directive 2018/2001).
All the input values used and the results of the calculations are contained in a report and in the Excel database reported below and available here.
Canada's wood flows and wood use for bioenergy
In this publication, I used existing statistical datasets to calculate wood flows across Canada's economy and generate the Sankey diagram below 👇