Systems analysis of sustainable bio-economy and transformation
Achieving the well-being of current and future generations without transgressing environmental limits implicates radical technological innovations, which may disrupt existent business models and entire industry logics, as well as innovations in social behavior, governance and regulation. In the transition to climate neutrality, biomass has long played an important but controversially discussed role. In recent years, the strong progress in biotechnological and biochemical process development has re-inspired the focus on biomass and its potential for replacing fossil carbon in a broad spectrum of applications including fuels, chemicals, power, and heat. Designing viable and resilient solutions to the multi-faceted sustainability challenges will have to be based on a sound scientific understanding of transformation pathways, which are at the same time (a) desirable (from a sustainability perspective), (b) feasible (from a techno-economic perspective), and (c) acceptable (from a stakeholder consensus perspective). At the same time, recent developments have shown vividly that socio-economic dynamics and (sometimes unexpected) external events can have a decisive impact on the diffusion of products and technologies, which have to be considered in system-analytical approaches. Robust scientific approaches are thus needed, integrating research across disciplinary boundaries into a comprehensive systems analysis of the bioeconomy transformation.
Speaker
Prof. Dr. Sandra Venghaus is a Professor at the School of Business and Economics at RWTH Aachen University and Head of the Department Economics of Sustainability and Bioeconomy at the Institute of Climate and Energy Systems (ICE). She holds a degree in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard University and earned her PhD at Leibniz University Hannover, focusing on innovation management in complex systems. From 2009 to 2014, she was a senior researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research before joining the Systems Analysis research division at ICE in 2014. Her current research focuses on the analysis of sustainable transformation processes and their resource implications.
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