Assessing climate-led social-ecological impacts and opportunities for resilience pathways in the EU bioeconomy

Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft FFG

BIOCLIMAPATHS will develop a highly innovative cross-sectoral modeling framework for comprehensive assessments of bioeconomy transitions subject to climate change impacts. BIOCLIMAPATHS’s consortium leverages on complementary expertise of interdisciplinary research teams and transdisciplinary knowledge co-production with stakeholders, to provide evidence-based policy-relevant results. These are fundamental to support stakeholders in society in fostering their understanding of novel risks and policy-led mitigation options related to transition paths towards a bioeconomy. In particular, BIOCLIMAPATHS pursues the following goals:
 Identification of spatially explicit climate hotspots in the European Union (EU)
 Assessment of climate hotspots in terms of bioeconomy damage functions (physical supply shocks of biomass) under various climate change and policy scenarios
 Development of the first databases of national and sub-national input-output (IO) tables with disaggregated bioeconomy sectors, to assess economic and environmental impacts of climate hazards on food and non-food biomass supply chains, i.e. based on agriculture and forestry
 Advancement of macro-ecological modelling by developing a novel Agent-Based Model embedded in a global IO framework. For the first time, the transmission of climate hazards will be traced through bioeconomy supply chains and assessed as monetary and distributive impacts on, and responses from, individual agents in socio-economic systems
 Assessment of stakeholder defined bioeconomy transition paths under various climate scenarios including the assessment of policy measures aiming at social-ecological resilience
 Assessment of social-ecological resilience of bioeconomy transition paths, in the context of achieving the SDGs, in particular in relation to the climate, food and energy security nexus.