Sustainability performance of national bio-economies

Despite the current drop in price, many fossil fuel resources are becoming increasingly scarce and their consumption is associated with climate change and harmful effects on ecosystems and human health. At the same time, population growth and corresponding pressures on natural resources have risen beyond safe ecological limits. In response to these societal challenges, countries have adopted ambitious global goals such as the 2°C limit to global warming, the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, and the Sustainable Development Goals. However, this unprecedented global awareness has yet to be matched with appropriate action towards achieving these goals and targets. An increasing number of countries look to the bio-economy as a strategy to reduce reliance on fossil fuel and enable sustainable development through a "biologization" of the regular economy. At global scale, however, bio-economies are diverse with sectors, such as agriculture, forestry, energy, chemicals & pharmaceuticals as well as science and education. We thus also expect large variation in the factors driving sustainability outcomes of bio-based development strategies and the appropriate strategies to promote them. In this study, we develop a typology of bio-economies based on country-specific characteristics. We describe five different bio-economy types with varying degrees of importance of the primary and the high-tech sector. While the importance of the high-tech sector is mirrored by the availability of skills, the importance of the primary sector for the national economy is apparently not dependent on the amount of bioproductive land but rather determined by lower levels of skill availability. In terms of sustainability performance, indicators suggest that diversified high-tech economies have experienced a slight improvement especially in terms of resource consumption and material footprints. Levels remain however at the highest levels compared to all other types with large amounts of resources and raw materials being imported from other countries, especially for non-food purposes. Increased competition between food, energy and the environment can push innovations for more efficient use of land, biomass and other resources but it can also increase imports of biomass, especially primary raw materials and associated externalization effects of environmental costs. In an increasingly telecoupled world, these results highlight the following priorities for sustainable development: the necessity of developed high-tech bio-economies to further decrease their environmental footprint domestically and internationally and the importance of biotechnology innovation transfer after critical and comprehensive sustainability assessments.