In 2018, bioeconomy in Italy has shown a production potential amounting to 345 billion euro, equal to approximately 10% of the total value of national production, employing approximately 2 million people. Italy is in third position at EU level. Germany is first with a production worth €414 billion and France second with €359 billion. Spain is fourth (€237 billion) followed by the UK (€223 billion). In these five countries, the bioeconomy is worth €1.568 trillion. Continue reading
Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, I must say how grateful I am to have been invited to be with you here today as we bring together the United Nations and the Commonwealth to discuss what we are calling The Great Reset. I would also like to thank the Permanent Representatives of Canada and Jamaica for convening this meeting and Prime Minister Trudeau for his inspiring leadership on the Green Recovery.
The need to react to the COVID-19 crisis is a unique opportunity to transform our economy and put forward the change that our society needs to create a sustainable and desirable future. A Circular Bioeconomy Roundtable convened by HRH The Prince of Wales last week discussed how this should be done: not just by designing recovery packages, but by transformative action to trigger mission-oriented innovation, attract investments and rethink business models and markets. Leading figures from science, the investment community and industry discussed how a circular bioeconomy offers game-changing solutions and is a crucial concept to move towards a carbon-neutral, renewable and inclusive economy that prospers in harmony with nature.
“I am convinced that this crisis will teach us many lessons and I am sure that the day after will find us working together to kick-star again our economies and drive our recovery towards a more resilient, green and digital EU.” Philippe Mengal, Executive Director of BBI JU, talks to Il Bioeconomista. In this exclusive interview, he tells us how the European bioeconomy is reacting to the crisis of coronavirus.
Interview by Mario Bonaccorso
International investor groups, including the Asia Investor Group on Climate Change (AIGCC), have encouraged global governments to ensure they are planning for a sustainable recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic by factoring in climate change risk into economic recovery plans.
An alliance has been launched in the European Parliament on the back of calls from 12 EU environment ministers who have signed an appeal for a green recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. The “green recovery alliance” was launched last Monday at the initiative of Pascal Canfin, a French centrist MEP who chairs the European Parliament’s committee on environment and public health.
It’s awesome! The emergency is finally over. We can go back to our life. The virus was defeated without waiting for the vaccine, because we all behaved in the best way, staying at home and respecting the physical distance. Now we can go back to meet, talk to each other and, if necessary, also to hug. We’ll always remember all the dead people and the sufferings. And also the physicians and nurses and all the people who spent themselves on others.
“We also need to careful that the warning bells don’t go unnoticed as we try to rebuild our way of life in the same mold as before. Already we are hearing murmurings about a need for cheap (and fossil) energy to stimulate ailing virus hit sectors. We do not need to go back in time, we need to move forward. Hopefully COVID will have taught us how bad things can get when we do not think, do not plan, do not collaborate, do not listen to the science, do not listen to early warnings. But the most important lesson, I think, is that through individual action and caring for others, people who were healthy and in “low” risk groups, stayed home. They were sacrificing for others; they were not thinking about themselves.”
To say it – in this exclusive interview with Il Bioeconomista – is Jennifer Holmgren, CEO of LanzaTech.
Interview by Mario Bonaccorso
We looked at the images broadcast on television from Wuhan as if they came from another planet. Until February 21, with the first case of contagion in Italy, the coronavirus seemed something that could not concern us. Then everything changes from February 23. Suddenly we plunged in fear, sometimes in panic, but above all we realized in one fell swoop that the human being is part of nature, even if at some point of the evolutionary history it seemed to break away from it to dominate it and break the balance on which it is based. The coronavirus and the disease that derives from it, called covid19, puts us again and dramatic ally in front of the limits of nature, our limits and our role on earth. It puts us in all its urgency in front of the issue of our development model, the interdependence of the globalized world, the solidarity between people and between countries, between North and South of the world.
The European Commission has adopted a new Circular Economy Action Plan – one of the main blocks of the European Green Deal, Europe’s new agenda for sustainable growth.
The new Action Plan announces initiatives along the entire life cycle of products, targeting for example their design, promoting circular economy processes, fostering sustainable consumption, and aiming to ensure that the resources used are kept in the EU economy for as long as possible.
IL BIOECONOMISTA 