Bioeconomy knowledge base :An online library to support EU policymaking

The bioeconomy covers all sectors and systems that rely on biological resources (animals, plants, microorganisms and derived biomass, including organic waste), their functions and principles. Compiling a robust information or evidence base is an essential component of better policymaking and one of the actions of the EU Bioeconomy Strategy is to enhance information and the knowledge base on the bioeconomy, including sustainable biomass supply and demand, and forward looking, cross-sectoral assessments, and to make this information accessible through the Knowledge Centre for Bioeconomy. Data, information and knowledge related to the bioeconomy are being produced at an accelerated pace and as the amount of available knowledge increases, the more pressing becomes the need to manage this knowledge. This means that knowledge needs to be properly captured, organised, stored, shared and disseminated. In this context, the Knowledge Centre for Bioeconomy includes an online library that provides a one-stop shop for filtered and distilled knowledge on the bioeconomy to support evidence-informed EU policymaking. Its strengths are the relevance, quality and accessibility of its resources as a result of a curation process and method developed through a series of gradual improvements and optimisations emerging from the lessons learnt over several years of operation. This library is regularly updated with the latest publications, datasets, events, news, visualisations and other resources, and made publicly accessible on the Commission’s Knowledge for Policy Platform (https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/). This report is the second in a series aimed at describing the workflow process and methods used in the curation task. The first report, published in early 2023 detailed how the knowledge is organised, stored and shared, with statistics on the resources available at the end of 2022. This second report expands on an updated approach for the filtering methodology carried out in 2023, contains an update of the statistics until the end of 2023 and explains how recommendations from the previous report have been addressed. Additional recommendations are also discussed in the concluding sections, to be considered for further work.