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CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Policy and Governance
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1563666
This article is part of the Research Topic From Waste to Wealth: Biomass Transformation in the Circular Economy View all articles
Six Footprints to Monitor the Bioeconomy into a Safe and Just Future
Provisionally accepted
Hanna Helander 1*
Meghan Beck-O'brien 1 Christian Lutz 2
Ruediger Schaldach 1 Anna Schomberg 1 Johannes Többen 2 Stefan Bringezu 1- 1 University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany
- 2 Gesellschaft für Wirtschaftliche Strukturforschung (GWS) mbH, Osnabrück, Germany
Environmental footprints should play a key role in monitoring the bioeconomy. They can capture environmental pressures and impacts of biomass production and extraction, as well as provide comparable per capita values disclosing how biomass use is distributed globally.As such, footprints could help ensure a sustainable transition and implementation of the bioeconomy. To develop national bioeconomy monitoring systems, we suggest six specific indicators and revise the state-of-art as regards their methodological development, as well as assess their applicability and feasibility for contributing to a systemic monitoring.Drawing on several years of collaborations between researchers from the different footprint domains, we introduce an integrated modelling approach to link global trade models for national footprint accounting with spatially specific impact assessments of terrestrial biomass production. The integrated approach captures all six indicators as it combines pressure indicators (forest-and agricultural biomass, agricultural land use and greenhouse gas emissions) and spatially specific impact indicators (water scarcity and biodiversity). This comprehensive and manageable set of footprint indicators addresses the main sustainability challenges of the bioeconomy developments.
Keywords: Environmental footprints, spatially explicit impact assessment, Ecological boundaries, MRIO, indicators
Received: 20 Jan 2025; Accepted: 31 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Helander, Beck-O'brien, Lutz, Schaldach, Schomberg, Többen and Bringezu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Hanna Helander, University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany
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