Aims
How we produce, consume, and create value is changing with the shift from fossil to renewable resources. Monitoring helps to identify risks, uncover opportunities and steer the transformation in a safe and fair way. This website brings together findings from long-term research projects on bioeconomy monitoring in Germany. It presents key themes, indicators, and methods to track developments and describes the strengths and limits of different monitoring approaches.
Who we are
This website is a collaborative effort – with authors stemming from a multitude of research organizations – managed and operated by researchers at the Kassel Institute of Sustainability in the context of the SYMOBIO project. It further combines inputs from complementary projects (including MoBi – Development of a systematic bioeconomy monitoring –, co-ordinated by Thünen Institute) against the background of the German National Bioeconomy Strategy.
SYMOBIO Project
SYMOBIO – Systemic Monitoring and Modelling of the Bioeconomy – focuses on developing tools, data and indicators at the national level in Germany. The team applies and develops methods such as footprint analyses, remote sensing, stakeholder surveys, case studies, model simulations and patent analyses to provide a systemic perspective of the bioeconomy transition. The project is in its third iteration with the current phase SYMOBIO 2 PLUS (2025-2027) aimed at consolidating findings from SYMOBIO 1.0 (2017-2021) and SYMOBIO 2.0 (2022-2025) to prepare the way for possible continuous monitoring. Specifically, the current phase of the project aims to develop concrete, practical and specific suggestions for how bioeconomy monitoring could be structured and managed in the future.
The project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) as part of the concept "Bioeconomy as Social Change".
The key results of SYMOBIO 1.0 were published in the 2021 pilot report.
The key results of SYMOBIO 2.0 were published in the 2024 Bioeconomy Monitoring Report.
SYMOBIO 2PLUS is a collaboration of the following partners:
- Kassel Institute for Sustainability (KIS), www.uni-kassel.de/go/kis
- Grassland Science and Renewable Plant Resources (GNR), www.uni-kassel.de/go/gnr
- Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), www.ufz.de
- Deutsches Biomasseforschungszentrum (DBFZ), www.dbfz.de
- Institute of Economic Structures Research (GWS), www.gws-os.com
- Institute of applied Ecology (Öko-Institut), www.oeko.de
- German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), www.idiv.de
- Global Risk Assessment Services (GRAS), www.gras-system.org
- Institute for Energy and Environment (IFEU), www.ifeu.de
- Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI), www.isi.fraunhofer.de
Disclaimer
Not all content is representative of the views of all contributors, nor does it always reflect the opinions of the project sponsors, project partners, or the University of Kassel
Contact
You are very welcome to contact the website team via