Establishing a robust sustainability index for the assessment of bioeconomy regions

The Bioeconomy strategy fosters the integration of the agricultural, chemical, pulp and paper industries and the energy sector for obtaining sustainable bio-based materials and bioenergy. Basically all industrial sectors relying on biomass are facing economic burdens by resource competition. The cascade and coupled use stand as potential solutions for cross-sectoral cooperations to mutually enhance economic competitiveness. However the monitoring of trade-offs between sustainability goals of individual industries and the overall system demands extensive knowledge-based elicitations. The challenge of establishing a sustainability index arising from stakeholder´s subjective perceptions of multidimensional issues requires to develop an integrated methodology out of nowadays most accepted and reliable assessment tools. This paper positions a sustainability index tool by reexamining the methodologies with regard to their appropriateness and generic strengths and weaknesses. The proposed combination of reference point approaches with preference-based elicitations is claimed as appropriate for establishing specific utility functions of sub-goals for bioeconomy.