World Congress of the Bioeconomy in East Africa GSB2024 Kenya

Global Bioeconomy Summit 2024: Regional Bioeconomy Hub presents bioeconomy in the Rhineland region

At the end of October, the global bioeconomy family came together for the first time outside Europe in Nairobi, Kenya, with 500 participants from 45 countries. The guiding theme: “One Planet - Sustainable Bioeconomy Solutions for Global Challenges”.

The Rhineland delegation from Forschungszentrum Jülich with BioökonomieREVIER, Bioeconomy Science Center, BIO2REG and the Jülich Systems Analysis ICE-2 as well as the Bioeconomy Council NRW returned very inspired back home.

Many thanks to Parliamentary State Secretary Claudia Müller from the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture and Christine Lang, Co-Chair of the International Advisory Council on Global Bioeconomy IACGB and organizer of the Global Bioeconomy Summit (GBS2024) for their exciting exchange at our booth.

The Jülich workshop contribution to the summit dealt with how regional strategies can be coordinated with global goals in order to advance the climate-friendly transformation in regions such as the Rhenish mining area.

The congress impressively demonstrated how sustainable, bio-based regional economies - adapted to local conditions - are emerging on all continents. The USA in particular, which has only been involved for a few years, has caught up considerably. Here, the bioeconomy is developing less from a sustainability perspective and more as a driver for the economy.

The summit provided valuable insights for decision-makers involved in implementing regional bioeconomies. The question of how to change a region is answered differently everywhere locally. For example, the focus may be on food security, the transformation of industry or sustainable agriculture. However, one thing always applies: the bioeconomy offers new perspectives for every country to reshape the future.

Christine Lang summarizes the global momentum of the Global Bioeconomy Summit (GBS2024): “The bioeconomy has made great progress worldwide in recent years. We have long advocated for it to be placed on the global agenda as we have recognized its potential as a growth opportunity for a sustainable economy. Today, we see the bioeconomy being taken up by international platforms such as the G20 and the G7, but there is still much to be done.”