What is the bioeconomy?

Abstract

The notion of grand challenges has over the last decade emerged as a central issue in policymaking and – increasingly – academia. In a European context, the Lund Declaration [1] stressed the urgency of pursuing solutions to problems in diverse fields such as climate change, food security, health, industrial restructuring and energy security. A key common denominator for these grand challenges is that they can be characterised as persistent problems, which are highly complex, open-ended and characterised by uncertainty in terms of how they can be addressed and solved – a partial solution may result in further problems at a later point in time due to feedback effects (Coenen, Hansen & Rekers, 2015; Schuitmaker, 2012; Upham, Klitkou & Olsen, 2016).