The bio-based economy is an emerging sector generating employment – around 22 million jobs across Europe – and economic growth. However, many European regions are still not aware of their potential to utilize sustainable feedstock in their production and need to gain more knowledge on how to take advantage of this new sector.
A project combining stakeholders’ engagement, regional analysis and strategy development across Europe
- Who is involved?
The project entitled ‘emPOWERing regional stakeholders for realising the full potential of european BIOeconomy’ or ‘POWER4BIO’ plays here an essential role, as it serves as an inter-regional platform developing and advancing regional strategies towards building strong European bioeconomies. The POWER4BIO consortium consists of 17 institutions from Germany, Belgium, Slovakia, Spain, Greece, the Netherlands, Hungary, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic and Ukraine and is coordinated by the Spanish Research Centre for Energy Resources and Consumption, CIRCE .
By being one of the project partners, ECRN serves as an intermediary between project’s activities and project partners. The network ensures active contribution and participation of regional authorities in the respective project activities and supports the dissemination and communication activities, as well as the organisation of regional workshops and networking inter and intra-regionally. ECRN has also involved several of its members in this project, namely Mazovia (PL) through the Mazovian Energy Agency, Flanders (BE), Saxony-Anhalt (DE), and Bavaria (DE) through the Chemie Cluster Bayern GMBH.
- What are the concrete activities?
POWER4BIO starts by mapping the main waste and raw materials available in each region, as well as the capacity the regions have to drive the transition towards a bio-based economy (business fabric, logistics…). Then, the project will carry out an analysis of which current technologies are suitable for making use of and transforming the raw materials available. POWER4BIO will also collect bio-based business models and examples of best practices, issue recommendations to use funding instruments and policies in Europe to support bioeconomy business models. The goal here is to draw up roadmaps and guidelines to help the regions understand, identify and pick out the most appropriate solutions to develop their local bioeconomy. POWER4BIO will eventually organise a training programme to encourage regional technicians to qualify in this field, which will ensure knowledge transfer across sectors and regions and jointly develop different sustainable bioeconomy value chains within 10 consortium member regions from 9 different countries.
Hence, in order to boost the bio-based economy, the project’s methodology combines stakeholders’ engagement, regional analysis and strategy development.
- How?
This Horizon 2020 project is co-financed with €3 million for a period of 30 months. It had its kick-off meeting in October 2018 in Brussels and should accomplish its activities in March 2021. The final project goal is to provide a methodology and toolkit to be used by all regions in Europe in the process of developing their bioeconomy.
You can read the POWER4BIO press release for further information.
To stay updated on the project’s activities, check out Power4Bio website and subscribe to the newsletter. Do not hesitate to follow the project on social media – Twitter, LinkedIn & Facebook – as well.
