The updated EU Bioeconomy Strategy puts forward an action plan to drive a sustainable and circular bioeconomy that serves Europe's society, environment and economy. Within this plan, the European Commission commits to build an EU-wide, internationally coherent, monitoring system to track economic, environmental and social progress towards a sustainable bioeconomy.

The JRC is leading this action. A first workshop of the Community of Practice on Bioeconomy on this topic was held in Brussels in November 2018 . Entitled “Setting the scene for monitoring the economic, environmental and social progress of the EU Bioeconomy”, it looked into existing monitoring approaches for the bioeconomy or related fields. In that event, experts illustrated the methodological background and progress achieved on various monitoring systems across the EU and shared lessons learnt and ideas for possible synergies in view of the EU's Bioeconomy Monitoring System. In this sequel event, the Community and invited experts have come together to discuss the methodological framework proposed by the JRC for the EU Bioeconomy Monitoring System as well as to discuss progress on the initial choice of specific indicators. Furthermore, the workshop provided an opportunity to learn from experts about tools and approaches to move beyond individual sector-specific indicators and for deriving indicators to monitor overall progress towards a sustainable and circular bioeconomy.

The workshop aimed to:

• Assess a first list of basic indicators with respect to their robustness and relevance to bioeconomy and to targets of Sustainable Development Goals
• Identify and quantify gaps in the set of basic indicators
• Derive recommendations on aggregate and systems-level indicators to highlight potential trade-offs related to the EU Bioeconomy
• Create new and consolidate existing networks of experts working on topics related to monitoring of the bioeconomy