BALancing humAn and Natural resource use in a Circular bioEconomy

To secure a good quality of life for present and future generations, societies must learn to meet human needs while staying within planetary boundaries. Climate change and resource depletion make it essential to move from a linear, fossil-based economy toward a circular bioeconomy that relies on renewable resources. Human needs, however, are not fixed. They vary across age, gender, income, education, and other demographic factors—and they evolve over time. An ageing population, migration, or rising incomes all shape the demand for housing, food, transport, and other essentials. Meeting these changing needs requires natural resources, which are themselves limited. The central challenge is therefore to satisfy diverse and dynamic human needs within the Earth’s ecological limits. BALANCE addresses this challenge by bridging two disciplines that have often worked separately: industrial ecology, which studies natural resource flows, and demography, which examines population change. By integrating these perspectives, the project develops a framework to better understand how human needs translate into sustainable resource use. Using case studies on food and housing in Norway, BALANCE demonstrates how this framework can inform strategies for a circular bioeconomy. The ultimate goal is to equip policymakers, businesses, and civil society with tools to coordinate actions that balance human well-being with the sustainable use of natural resources.

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BALANCE will create a strategic tool that can guide decision makers as they attempt to grow the Norwegian bioeconomy and increase circular rather than linear flows of resources. The project’s research findings will generate a comprehensive understanding of the interlinkages between natural and human resources systems as well as the economic system in key sectors that drive production and consumption patterns. These sectors include aquaculture, forestry and agriculture. BALANCE empirically assesses and maps interactions between natural resources use and human populations by innovatively integrating a socioeconomic metabolism model with a demographic metabolism model. The former deals with the dynamics of natural resources while the latter deals with population dynamics driving production and consumption. These maps and models, combined with an analysis of policies and framework conditions, will be developed and used in a transdisciplinary learning process involving different user groups. The result will be an identification of alternative pathways towards a circular bioeconomy. Norway’s Bioeconomy Strategy has three overarching objectives: value creation and employment, climate change mitigation, and resource efficiency. However, it is unclear how and to what extent these objectives can be reached under alternative scenarios, because different interventions interact, either supporting or hindering each other. The strategic tools developed in BALANCE will enable stakeholders to identify and to quantitatively evaluate alternative pathways to a circular bioeconomy and to make better informed and coordinated decisions necessary to balance these objectives. The integration of socioeconomic and demographic metabolism has a high potential to generate a new line of sustainability research that addresses both a better understanding of human needs and the means to satisfy them with limited resources.