In our new Season 3 of Branching out: the forest podcast, we explore how scientists collaborate across disciplines to tackle emerging topics. This work happens through IUFRO Task Forces. We kick off the Season with the topic of bioeconomy and the Task Force on Building an Integrated Vision of the Forest-Based Sector within a Bioeconomy.
Host Gerda Wolfrum and co-host Fernanda Gonzalez from IUFRO HQ spoke with Ivana Živojinović, a senior scientist at BOKU University in Vienna (Institute of Forest, Environmental and Natural Resource Policy and the Center for Bioeconomy), and Ricardo Vargas Carpintero, who recently completed his PhD at the University of Hohenheim, Germany and is now based in Colombia. They shared their insights on how the forest-based sector can contribute to a bioeconomy.
The concept of bioeconomy is not new, but it has broadened into a more holistic framing that connects the ways how we produce, how we use and value biological resources within larger sustainability goals. The aim is to provide sustainable solutions across different economic sectors, by shifting from fossil-based inputs and linear economical models towards circular and regenerative systems.
Ivana explained, "This includes aspects of reuse, recycling, using resource efficiency, and ensuring that value creation does not come at the expense of biodiversity, of water or even people's rights and livelihoods." Bioeconomy is not a single model; countries and regions emphasize different pathways.
In this context, Ricardo talked about the situation in Latin America where biodiversity plays a key role. He said, "Incorporating biodiversity in the bioeconomy to create economic value and contribute to the environment, for example, by restoring degraded lands or providing ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, is one of these visions that is quite important in the Latin American context."
The forest-based sector is integral to a bioeconomy, but its scope is still quite narrow and mainly focused on timber, fiber and carbon. To make the scope of the forest sector within a bioeconomy broader and multifunctional, further innovation - not only technical or technological innovation, also institutional, organizational and social innovation – is required. In addition, cooperation between policymakers, public sector, primary producers, industry, and society must be enhanced. As Ivana pointed out, "Bioeconomy transition as such will be successful only if it's coherent and inclusive and really grounded in diversity. This silo thinking will not help much."
