Bioeconomy and biorefining strategies in the EU Member States and beyond

Food security, energy supply, and climate change are among the biggest global challenges in the next future. Radical changes in the economy are necessary to face these challenges. The Bioeconomy, including the deployment of various biorefining strategies, represents one of the pillars for a more sustainable global development. In 2012, the European Union (EU) and the USA adopted their respective strategies on Bioeconomy. Since then a number of national and international agendas have been developed. The Joint Research Centre (JRC), as coordinator of the European Commission's Knowledge Centre for Bioeconomy (BKC), in collaboration with the Biobased Industries Joint Undertaking (BBI JU), the Technology Collaboration Programme (TCP) Bioenergy of the International Energy Agency (IEA), and with input from other stakeholders, undertook a survey on the Bioeconomy progress status in the EU Member States. IEA Bioenergy Task42 cooperated in this survey by in particular extending the analysis to extra EU countries, and providing a database of the recently developed biorefineries.

The outcomes of the survey are available on the website of the Bioeconomy Knowledge Centre (BKC) (https://biobs.jrc.ec.europa.eu/), as web-based interactive dashboard, interactive overview maps and separate reports from the partner organizations, allowing a flexible approach for subsequent updates. The present report summarizes the main outputs of the survey, provides some snapshots of the status of the Bioeconomy in EU and non EU countries, and gives the current status of biorefineries deployment in the different countries. This report will be disseminated through the website of IEA Bioenergy (https://ieabioenergy.com/); whereas the biorefinery-related