Liesbeth de Schutter (p)

Viktor Varjú

In an effort to reconcile economic growth with climate constraints, the European Union has launched a bioeconomy strategy to support the transition towards the use of biological materials, energy and (bio)technologies in economic value chains. However, critical knowledge gaps exist regarding novel risks, interdependencies and potential vulnerabilities related to bioeconomy activities and related transition paths under increasing climate hazard risk. In particular, data gaps and methodological inadequacies exist at the sub-national level of societies, where agricultural production takes place in heterogeneous agronomic regions that are subject to diverse and increasingly co-occurring climate extremes. In this study, we apply a mixed method to gain insights on the propagation channels of physical supply shocks and the social amplification of price risk in a bioeconomy that is impacted by heat extremes, drought extremes, precipitation extremes, cold extremes and forest fires. First, a structured literature review has been conducted that sheds light on distinct biophysical and economic risk propagation patterns in the EU bioeconomy from primary production through food and non-food biobased supply chains on to the household level. Second, empirical patterns of biophysical impacts of sub-national (NUTS 2) climate hazards have been identified in physical supply-use tables for agricultural crops & timber. Third, social multiplication of biophysical supply shocks have been analysed in terms of economic risk propagation from primary production towards the household level in EU cities, regions and countries in monetary supply-use tables. Fourth, finally, potential impacts and social vulnerabilities have been modelled and analysed under different (RCP) climate risk scenarios. As compared to the state of the art in empirical research on the impact of climate extremes on agriculture in a climate change context, this research reveals critical dependencies, risk propagation patterns and vulnerabilities among economic activities, communities and countries in the EU bioeconomy.

Viktor Varjú (p)

Éva Orbán

see extended abstract

In general, circular economy is interpreted as an effort to promote better waste management and resource efficiency with the ambition to pursue the transition towards circular economy with a focus on closing the material flow loops, aiming for ‘zero waste’, generating new business models based on waste as a resource, and deeply transforming society’s approach to consumption and disposal of goods and materials. Those ambitions, however, tend to be watered down when confronted with the multiple governance, economic, legal, socio-spatial, socio-cultural, sociological and behavioural barriers (Dąbrowski, Varjú and Amenta 2019). Although sustainable resource management is a global and borderless phenomenon, the actors who participate in resources governance are both governmental and non-governmental institutions and agents from global, national, regional and local levels, each disposing of specific responsibilities and territorial limitations/scope (Bamberg and Möser 2007, Kaiser et al. 2007).
This paper sheds light on an attempt to assess CE transition from 5 point of view: Governance, Waste awareness, supporting tools (e.g. material flow analysis), sustainability assessment and the built environment. The assessment tool - that will be presented - was elaborated in a four-year-long H2020 project investigating resource management in six peri-urban regions and afterwards, organising workshops with relevant stakeholders. Stakeholders were chosen equally from company, civic, governmental, and academic sectors equally by the leaders of peri-urban living labs in the six case study areas. The paper focuses on the elaborated tools and their tests in Amsterdam, Naples, Ghent, Łódź, Hamburg and Pécs, presenting the regional disparities in the circular economy transition. The paper not only presents the cities of different stages in circular transition, but also presents the difficulties of exploration, the different viewpoints of stakeholders in the peri-urban labs and the workshops. The results show that, although the different stage of the peri-urban regions along the five dimensions can be assessed, a rank can be made, the assessment with stakeholders faces several barriers due to the different disciplinary background, hence the different “culture” of the stakeholders.