Mr. M?ns Nilsson is the Executive Director of the Stockholm Environment Institute and a Member of the Expert Group on Climate and SDG Synergy
M?ns Nilsson: Innovative Bioeconomy Strategies Driving Climate Action & Sustainable Development
Executive Director, Stockholm Environment Institute Member of the Expert Group on Climate and SDG Synergy
Q: If you could prioritize one innovation or policy that would make climate action more impactful in achieving the SDGs, what would it be?
I would give priority to advancing innovative bioeconomy strategies across sectors such as agriculture, pharmaceuticals, energy, and construction.
Bioeconomy strategies that reach across different sectors have the potential to:
- Transform multiple industries such as chemicals, fertilizers, and energy towards net zero goals by replacing fossil-based materials and processes with regenerative biobased alternatives.
- Create circular economic systems that minimize and reuse waste and put it to productive uses.
- Generate significant rural employment opportunities through local production and small businesses.
- Strengthen food security by diversifying crop varieties and agricultural practices.
- Strengthen the role of women and gender equality in the economy.
- Go hand in hand with improving governance and sustainable use of natural resources and biological diversity.
Adopting a bioeconomy concept based on innovation can transform rural economies, creating skilled jobs in biofeedstock production, processing facilities, and related research. These opportunities can help reverse rural-to-urban migration by providing meaningful employment in areas facing economic decline.
Bioinnovation approaches to agriculture—such as developing drought-resistant crop varieties, biological soil improvements, and precision fermentation using microorganisms—can also directly address food security challenges exacerbated by climate change, thus impacting both climate mitigation and resilience.
What makes this approach particularly powerful is how bioinnovation can work with natural systems, creating solutions that can simultaneously tackle climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource scarcity while generating economic opportunities. The key would be creating policy frameworks that accelerate bioinnovation pathways while ensuring equitable access to benefits -- supporting knowledge transfer across countries.
*The bioeconomy refers to those parts of the economy that use and add value to renewable biological resources from land and sea, such as crops, forests, fish, animals, and micro-organisms, to produce food, pharmaceuticals, materials, chemicals, textiles, and energy.