Brightcon 2026, hackathon and courses

The bioeconomy is promoted as a concept that enables sustainable green growth by enabling the substitution of fossil resources with regenerative ones. The term encompasses several different visions. Depending on whom one asks, the bioeconomy promises either regional autarky, sufficiency within planetary boundaries, or climate-neutral global supply chains. With this work we aim to make those different visions tangible and assess their environmental implications. We answer the research question: Which environmental impacts result from different future visions of the bioeconomy?
We will present early results of answering this research question for the chemistry and transport sector in Germany. The results are achieved based on the following three methodological steps.
First, linking bioeconomy visions to the biomass-use optimization model BenOpt (Jordan et al. 2023). In previous work the model scope has been extended to additionally include material uses of biomass. In this work we will present three bioeconomy scenarios representing three different visions: a regional, a sufficiency-based and a global bioeconomy. Second, we soft-couple the biomass utilization pathways to life cycle inventories derived from literature and databases. This enables us to present life cycle assessment results of those bioeconomy scenarios. Third, we will conduct an absolute environmental sustainability assessment to determine not only which of the expressed scenarios and visons might be the most sustainable. We will also answer the question which vision is sustainable enough, in order to remain within biophysical limits (Bjørn et al. 2020).
The studies novelty consists out of the integration of bioeconomy scenarios for multiple sectors and their environmental assessment against planetary boundaries. With this the presented work will assess the bioeconomy’s capability to deliver goods and services within biophysical limits, lays the ground work to extend the assessment to further sectors and discuss necessary methodological adaptions. Discussed future potential additions include social and regional assessment, as well as integration of optimization within biophysical limits.

References
Bjørn A, Chandrakumar C, Boulay A-M, Doka G, Fang K, Gondran N, Hauschild MZ, Kerkhof A, King H, Margni M, McLaren S, Mueller C, Owsianiak M, Peters G, Roos S, Sala S, Sandin G, Sim S, Vargas-Gonzalez M, Ryberg M (2020) Review of life-cycle based methods for absolute environmental sustainability assessment and their applications. Environ. Res. Lett. 15(8): 83001. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab89d7
Jordan M, Meisel K, Dotzauer M, Schröder J, Cyffka K-F, Dögnitz N, Schmid C, Lenz V, Naumann K, Daniel-Gromke J, Paiva GC de, Schindler H, Aliabadi DE, Szarka N, Thrän D (2023) The controversial role of energy crops in the future German energy system: The trade offs of a phase-out and allocation priorities of the remaining biomass residues. Energy Reports 10: 3848–3858. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egyr.2023.10.055