The bioeconomy, which would utilize biomass resources for the renewable production of energy, fuels, and products, has been proposed as a mechanism by which Ontario’s resource-dependent communities might be revitalized. This thesis applies a knowledge economy framework to the establishment of a bioeconomy, with a strong focus on bioenergy as a first step, in Kingston and the surrounding region. The knowledge economy approach was examined in relation to other measures of sustainability and security. A series of 25 expert interviews informed an analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats on the topic of the knowledge-based bioeconomy study region. The ability of the knowledge-based approach to assess the requirements of the bioeconomy was then evaluated using a statistical assessment of the study region based on Florida’s ‘creative economy’ framework, and this assessment was compared to key factors noted in the SWOT analysis. Research findings indicate that basic necessities such as feedstock, technology and transportation routes are likely available across the study region. However, key elements of the knowledge economy are absent particularly human resources in the ‘creative’ class. The knowledge-based approach is not particularly well suited to capturing all aspects of the bioeconomy, as it overlooks physical geographical features, which may be better measured by other tools. More focused policy with regard to renewable energy locally, provincially and nationally is seen to be important for advancing the bioeconomy. Acting on opportunities and using regional strengths will insure a successful implementation of a knowledge-based bioeconomy that will provide the benefits of economic growth associated with knowledge economies. / Thesis (Master, Geography) -- Queen's University, 2012-09-28 14:01:25.454

The present work, where additional value-creating processes in existing combined heat and power (CHP) structures have been examined, is motivated by a political- and consumer-driven strive towards a bioeconomy and a stagnation for the existing business models in large parts of the CHP sector. The research is based on cases where the integration of flash pyrolysis for co-production of bio-oil, co-gasification for production of fuel gas and synthetic biofuels as well as leaching of extractable fuel components in existing CHP plants have been simulated. In particular, this work has focused on the CHP plants that utilize boilers of fluidized bed (FB) type, where the concept of coupling a separate FB reactor to the FB of the boiler forms an important basis for the analyses. In such dual fluidized bed (DFB) technology, heat is transferred from the boiler to the new rector that is operating with other fluidization media than air, thereby enabling other thermochemical processes than combustion to take place. The result of this work shows that broader operations at existing CHP plants have the potential to enable production of significant volumes of chemicals and/or fuels with high efficiency, while maintaining heat supply to external customers. Based on the insight that the technical preconditions for a broader operation are favourable, the motivation and ability among the incumbents in the Swedish CHP sector to participate in a transition of their operation towards a biorefinery was examined. The result of this assessment showed that the incumbents believe that a broader operation can create significant values for their own operations, the society and the environment, but that they lack both a strong motivation as well as important abilities to move into the new technological fields. If the concepts of broader production are widely implemented in the Swedish FB based CHP sector, this can substantially contribute in the transition towards a bioeconomy. / Bioeconomy has been identified to hold a great potential for reducing fossil fuel dependence and for maintaining and creating economic growth. Large parts of the combined heat and power (CHP) sector, which successfully have contributed in the transition towards a fossil free society, are at present facing stagnation. District heating actors are facing challenges due to warmer climate, better insulated buildings and competition from heat pumps. The forest industry where CHP plants supplies processes with heat is facing structural changes foremost in the graphic segments. The emerging bioeconomy and the stagnation for the existing business models in large parts of the CHP sector form the background for the examination of additional value-creating processes in the existing CHP structure presented in this thesis. The technical viability for integration of fast pyrolysis, gasification and leaching with existing CHP plants has been analysed as well as the motivation and ability of the CHP incumbents to participate in a transition towards the bioeconomy by developing their plants to biorefineries.

An increasing number of countries develop bio-economy strategies to promote a stronger reliance on the efficient use of renewable biological resources in order to meet multiple sustainability challenges. At the global scale, however, bio-economies are diverse, with sectors such as agriculture, forestry, energy, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, as well as science and education. In this study, we developed a typology of bio-economies based on country-specific characteristics, and describe five different bio-economy types with varying degrees of importance in the primary and the high-tech sector. We also matched the bio-economy types against the foci of their bio-economy strategies and evaluated their sustainability performance. Overall, high-tech bio-economies seem to be more diversified in terms of their policy strategies while the policies of those relying on the primary sector are focused on bioenergy and high-tech industries. In terms of sustainability performance, indicators suggest that diversified high-tech economies have experienced a slight sustainability improvement, especially in terms of resource consumption. Footprints remain, however, at the highest levels compared to all other bio-economy types with large amounts of resources and raw materials being imported from other countries. These results highlight 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.

The manufacture of the chemical ethylene, a key ingredient in plastics, currently depends on fossil-fuel-derived carbon and generates significant greenhouse gas emissions. Substituting ethylene's fossil fuel feedstock with alternatives is important for addressing the challenge of global climate change. This paper compares four scenarios for meeting future ethylene supply under differing societal approaches to climate change based on the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. The four scenarios use four perspectives: (1) a sustainability-focused pathway that demands a swift transition to a bioeconomy within 30 years; (2) a regional energy-focused pathway that supports broad biomass use; (3) a fossil-fuel development pathway limited to corn grain; and (4) a fossil-fuel development pathway limited to corn grain and corn stover. Each scenario is developed using the latest scientifically informed future feedstock analyses from the 2016 Billion-Ton report interpreted with perspectives on the future of biomass from recent literature. The intent of this research is to examine how social, economic, and ecological changes determining ethylene supply fit within biophysical boundaries. This new approach to the ethylene feedstocks conundrum finds that phasing out fossil fuels as the main source of U.S. ethylene is possible if current cellulosic ethanol production expands.

To date the concept of the bioeconomy - an economy based primarily on biogenic instead of fossil resources - has largely been associated with visions of "green growth" and the advancement of biotechnology and has been framed from within an industrial perspective. However, there is no consensus as to what a bioeconomy should effectively look like, and what type of society it would sustain. In this paper, we identify different types of narratives constructed around this concept and carve out the techno-political implications they convey. We map these narratives on a two-dimensional option space, which allows for a rough classification of narratives and their related imaginaries into four paradigmatic quadrants. We draw the narratives from three different sources: (i) policy documents of national and supra-national authorities; (ii) stakeholder interviews; and (iii) scenarios built in a biophysical modelling exercise. Our analysis shows that there is a considerable gap between official policy papers and visions supported by stakeholders. At least in the case of Austria there is also a gap between the official strategies and the option space identified through biophysical modelling. These gaps testify to the highly political nature of the concept of the bioeconomy and the diverging visions of society arising from it.

Tidigare feministiska studier om kommersiellt surrogatmödraskap har huvudsakligen fokuserat på hur surrogatindustrin fungerar inom ett land. Med en utgångspunkt i en feminist-marxistisk begreppsapparat, syftar följande kandidatuppsats att synliggöra hur dagens sydostasiatiska surrogatmarknad verkar gränsöverskridande och informellt. Utifrån en kvalitativ fallstudie på Kambodja kan vi inneha en förståelse till hur globalisering möjliggjort surrogatföretagens gränsöverskridande expansion, men även vilka ytterligare osäkerhetsfaktorer som drabbar surrogaterna när de flyttas över gränser. Studiens resultat argumenterar för att det är både materiella och idémässiga skiften som legitimerar att kvinnors biologiska material blivit en del av ett bioekonomiskt, profitskapande projekt. Genom att undersökningen erhåller ny empiri bidrar studien till att etablera en riktning för framtida forskning inom det IPE-feministiska paradigmet. Samtidigt övertygar studiens resultatet om att det feminist-marxistiskt perspektivet är relevant inom fältet Internationella Relationer. / Previous feminist studies on commercial surrogacy have mainly focused on how the surrogate industry operates within a country. With a starting point from a feminist-marxist conceptual framework, the following bachelor thesis aims to highlight how the current southeast asian surrogacy market operates cross-border and informal. Based on a qualitative case study in Cambodia, we can understand how globalization enabled the cross-border expansion of the surrogate companies, but also which additional factors of insecurity that will affect the surrogates when they are moved across borders. The results of the study argue that it’s both material and ideational shifts that legitimize that women’s biological material became part of a bioeconomic profitable project. By gaining new empirical knowledge, the study contributes to establishing a direction for future research within the IPE-feminist paradigm. At the same time, the result of the study convinces that a feminist-marxist perspective is relevant within the field of International Relations.

A rapidly growing share of global agricultural areas is devoted to the production of biomass for non-food purposes. The expanding non-food bioeconomy can have far-reaching social and ecological implications; yet, the non-food sector has attained little attention in land footprint studies. This paper provides the first assessment of the global cropland footprint of non-food products of the European Union (EU), a globally important region regarding its expanding bio-based economy. We apply a novel hybrid land flow accounting model, combining the biophysical trade model LANDFLOW with the multi-regional input-output model EXIOBASE. The developed hybrid approach improves the level of product and country detail, while comprehensively covering all global supply chains from agricultural production to final consumption, including highly-processed products, such as many non-food products. The results highlight the EU's role as a major processing and the biggest consuming region of cropland-based non-food products while at the same time relying heavily on imports. Two thirds of the cropland required to satisfy the EU's non-food biomass consumption are located in other world regions, particularly in China, the US and Indonesia, giving rise to potential impacts on distant ecosystems. With almost 39% in 2010, oilseeds used to produce for example biofuels, detergents and polymers represented the dominant share of the EU's non-food cropland demand. Traditional non-food biomass uses, such as fibre crops for textiles and animal hides and skins for leather products, also contributed notably (22%). Our findings suggest that if the EU Bioeconomy Strategy is to support global sustainable development, a detailed monitoring of land use displacement and spillover effects is decisive for targeted and effective EU policy making.

Bioeconomy strategies in high income societies focus at replacing finite, fossil resources by renewable, biological resources to reconcile macro-economic concerns with climate constraints. However, the current bioeconomy is associated with critical levels of environmental degradation. As a potential increase in biological resource use may further threaten the capacity of ecosystems to fulfil human needs, it remains unclear whether bioeconomy transitions in high income countries are sustainable. In order to fill a gap in bioeconomy sustainability assessments, we apply an ontological lens of coupled social-ecological systems to explore critical mechanisms in relation to bioeconomy activities in the global resource system. This contributes to a social-ecological systems (SES)-based understanding of sustainability from a high income country perspective: the capacity of humans to satisfy their needs with strategies that reduce current levels of pressures and impacts on ecosystems. Building on this notion of agency, we develop a framework prototype that captures the systemic relation between individual human needs and collective social outcomes on the one hand (microlevel) and social-ecological impacts in the global resource system on the other hand (macro-level). The BIO-SES framework emphasizes the role of responsible consumption (for physical health), responsible production (to reduce stressors on the environment), and the role of autonomy and selforganisation (to protect the reproduction capacity of social-ecological systems). In particular, the BIO-SES framework can support (1) individual and collective agency in high income country contexts to reduce global resource use and related ecosystem impacts with a bioeconomy strategy, (2) aligning social outcomes, monitoring efforts and governance structures with place-based efforts to achieve the SDGs, as well as (3), advancing the evidence base and social-ecological theory on responsible bioeconomy transitions in the limited biosphere.

Members of the Gitga’at First Nation are committed to supporting the ecological integrity of their territory, as well as the vitality of their community and way of life, through carefully selected and implemented local development initiatives. This case study focuses on community member perspectives on ecologically supported cultural tourism. The first objective was to describe aspects of the local context shaping perspectives on tourism development. The second objective was to synthesise perspectives on the appropriate use of resources and on the appropriate application and sharing of local and elders’ knowledge for tourism. The third objective sought to identify services and linkages with other institutions considered important for a business aligned with local development priorities. There is potential for eco-cultural tourism to support local needs and interests if its development is directed and controlled by the Gitga’at and is based on a process of deliberation within the community.

Members of the Gitga’at First Nation are committed to supporting the ecological integrity of their territory, as well as the vitality of their community and way of life, through carefully selected and implemented local development initiatives. This case study focuses on community member perspectives on ecologically supported cultural tourism. The first objective was to describe aspects of the local context shaping perspectives on tourism development. The second objective was to synthesise perspectives on the appropriate use of resources and on the appropriate application and sharing of local and elders’ knowledge for tourism. The third objective sought to identify services and linkages with other institutions considered important for a business aligned with local development priorities. There is potential for eco-cultural tourism to support local needs and interests if its development is directed and controlled by the Gitga’at and is based on a process of deliberation within the community.