Germany’s bioeconomy monitoring landscape mapped, revealing gaps in social and circular indicators

Germany has no shortage of data about its bioeconomy. What it has lacked, until now, is a clear picture of how all that data fits together. A new review published in Energy, Sustainability and Society has mapped the landscape of monitoring systems that track aspects of the German bioeconomy, from forest inventories to greenhouse gas reports to global fisheries databases, and found that while the landscape is broad, it is also strikingly uneven.

Unlike the many studies that propose new indicators, the researchers focused on established systems that regularly report over longer periods and document actual developments, unrestricted to individual research projects.

From an initial pool of 100 monitoring initiatives identified at national, European and global levels, the team filtered out systems that lacked continuity, were still under development, or could not provide detailed information such as indicators. That left 71 continuously updated, publicly available monitoring systems, which the authors classified according to the sectors they cover, the sustainability pillars they address, and the objectives of the EU Bioeconomy Strategy 2025.

The geographical spread is wide. German sources account for 32 of the systems, almost half the collection, and 18 of those offer detailed regional information through indicators for federal states or spatial data. Nineteen systems operate at the European level, most collecting information from individual countries, with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre acting as the main initiator and administrator. A further 20 systems provide a global perspective, many of them initiated by the United Nations, such as the Global Forest Resources Assessment.

In terms of content, the review found that primary production sectors, agriculture, forestry and fisheries, are the main focus of the monitoring systems, with considerably less attention on the subsequent processing of biomass. The number of systems specialised in agricultural production is limited, although the FAOSTAT database effectively covers production and land aspects through its extensive data. In forestry, multiple systems operate at both German and European levels, such as the Wood resource monitoring. Blue bioeconomy monitoring, covering marine resources, is less prominent but offers scattered activities. Only a few initiatives address secondary biomass processing sectors, such as biofuels and bioplastics, although cross-sectoral systems like the Statistics report on cultivation and use of renewable raw materials in Germany offer overarching perspectives on value chains.

Many of the systems in the collection are indirectly related to the bioeconomy, and here the picture is dominated by environmental topics. The categories atmosphere, mainly climate change, biodiversity, and ecosystem protection are the most prevalent, a pattern the authors attribute largely to reporting obligations such as the Greenhouse Gas Inventory Data reported under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. About 40 of the listed systems are based on reporting obligations or policies, from Germany’s Federal Climate Change Act to the Paris Agreement. Environmental sustainability is emphasised the most, represented in nearly all gathered systems, and economic aspects appear in two-thirds of the initiatives. Social aspects, by contrast, are the least addressed, with only a limited number of systems dedicated solely to them, and even those, such as the Poverty and Wealth Report of the Federal Government, are not specifically tailored to the bioeconomy.

To probe deeper, the researchers screened the systems that directly address bioeconomy sectors against 20 selected impact categories aligned with the four objectives of the EU Bioeconomy Strategy 2025, plus food security as an additional category. The results reveal a clear hierarchy. Innovation and investment emerge as the weakest link: only two of the assessed monitoring systems address innovation indicators, among them the Monitoring biofuel sector system, which quantifies subsidies for biofuels. The second objective, building new lead markets for bio-based materials and technologies, fares better, with indicators on material efficiency, replacement of non-renewable resources, and market support, including the material footprint integrated into the EU Bioeconomy Monitoring System and the Global Material Flow Database. The third objective, ensuring sustainable biomass supply across value chains, is covered by a wide spectrum of indicators, from the area of high nature value farmland to soil organic carbon in arable land, forest damage and protected forest area, and fish stock dynamics. The fourth objective, harnessing global opportunities, is addressed through trade data, biodiversity conservation indicators such as bird and butterfly indices, and greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and land use.

The gaps are as informative as the coverage. Hardly any indicators on circularity were found beyond recycling statistics in databases such as EUROSTAT, which tracks the recovery of paper, cardboard and wooden packaging. Resource utilisation pathways, resource efficiency and innovation are underrepresented. The collected systems cover mostly terrestrial ecosystems, while marine resources and ecosystems are captured by fewer indicators in nationwide approaches, a shortfall the authors note could partly stem from their review methodology but may also reflect a perception that marine issues are local concerns for coastal regions rather than national ones. Various approaches exist to record marine species populations and habitats, but their fragmentation makes tracking difficult, a problem projects like the Wadden Sea Quality Status Report attempt to resolve by gathering existing indicator sets across nations bordering the North Atlantic.

The weakness in social sustainability is particularly pronounced. The authors cite research showing that the social dimension is addressed in only 4% of studies on bioeconomy impact analysis, and they note that existing efforts to develop social indicators for the bioeconomy have not yet been operationalised. Most current approaches are limited to factors such as turnover, value added and the number of workers in bioeconomy sectors, and the authors argue it is necessary to go further and evaluate working conditions, qualifications and social change. They suggest that social indicators referring to food security could be drawn from bioeconomy-related monitoring systems, taking into account food waste, food production self-sufficiency and nutrition, and that indicators on education and work, such as the number of people in apprenticeship roles within bioeconomy sectors or the gender pay gap, would be valuable additions not yet present in the collection.

The review also carries important caveats. The authors acknowledge that the landscape presented is not exhaustive, that their choice of a biomass-based definition of the bioeconomy may introduce bias by excluding systems beyond biomass production, and that the search was limited to English and German sources. Several monitoring systems were still under development at the time of the study, including a soil biodiversity indicator for Germany. The results should therefore be interpreted as indicative of specific gaps rather than a complete collection. Nevertheless, the authors conclude that linking existing initiatives could provide more comprehensive, holistic monitoring adapted to stakeholder needs while reducing monitoring effort, and that their compilation can serve as a foundation for identifying synergies and guiding future national bioeconomy monitoring efforts, particularly as Germany’s bioeconomy strategy explicitly calls for monitoring that tracks the development of a sustainable bioeconomy and serves as a basis for reviewing policy steering and prioritisation.

Subject of Research: A review of established monitoring systems related to the German bioeconomy and their coverage of EU Bioeconomy Strategy objectives

Article Title: Mapping a monitoring landscape – review of monitoring systems related to the German bioeconomy

Article References: Zinke, C., Mittelstädt, N., Thrän, D., & Bezama, A. (2026). Mapping a monitoring landscape – review of monitoring systems related to the German bioeconomy. Energy, Sustainability and Society, 16(1), Article 43. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13705-026-00606-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13705-026-00606-7

Keywords: bioeconomy, monitoring systems, Germany, sustainability indicators, EU Bioeconomy Strategy, biomass, biodiversity, circular economy, food security, social sustainability, review study, Mapping