Carbon Management: Bioeconomy and Beyond
The bioeconomy brings opportunities for economic growth while tackling climate change. Fossil carbon resources can be replaced by bio-based carbon resources, especially biomass. To allow these solutions to be scaled up without threats to biodiversity and the environment, it is necessary to develop the bioeconomy as a circular economy. With this carbon management approach, other sources of carbon complement biomass: industrial waste, including gases such as CO and CO2, as well as physically and chemically recycled carbon. In the future, direct air capture (DAC) may become competitive and form part of the solution. These approaches can be considered ‘circular’ because they close material loops and keep carbon recycling in the economy rather than emitting carbon to the atmosphere. This report reviews a number of hybrid technologies that can be deployed to ‘defossilise’ economic sectors and sets out policy options to bring these technologies to commercial scale.
Holistic innovation policy
The complexity of carbon management in terms of the range of economic sectors and the developing technologies suggests that applying policy to only a single part of a value chain or ecosystem of actors is likely to cause knock-on effects elsewhere. In holistic policy formulation, the core policy problems that tend to afflict the activities of innovation systems are identified, including the unintended consequences of policy itself. It is especially important due to the need for a range of both technology-push and market-pull policies.
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