Europe’s biosolutions sector uses nature to boost sustainability and resilience – Euractiv

Biosolutions are nature’s instruments and offer a powerful path to accelerate the transition to a sustainable and greener future, while at the same time strengthening Europe’s resilience, supply chain sovereignty and competitiveness.

They can include processes such as the fermentation of food for a more sustainable food system, and the industrial scale-up of enzymes to speed up certain production processes while saving water, energy and raw materials. The genetic modification of micro-organisms to produce high-quality products via precision fermentation, such as nutrients, biopheromones and biomaterials.

While the sector is not new, there is a vibrant emerging biosolutions market that extends far beyond the pharmaceutical sector to include the development of renewable energy and fuels, creating bio-based solutions for industries and applications.

Agricultural seed treatments are a growing sector for biosolutions, with Poncho® Votivo® 2.0 for example a leading and vibrant product. It is a combination of two bacterial strains that are carefully applied to seeds. A living barrier is created around the seed that prevents damage from harmful soil-dwelling insects that would feed on the small, fragile roots of a young plant.

This type of biological crop protection is a biosolution created by BASF and is just one example of how beneficial living organisms and nature-identical substances can help improve crop protection management and support plants throughout their life cycle, while contributing to a more sustainable, greener future. , by harnessing the potential of nature’s own instruments.

The value of global biosolutions markets (including the European market) could increase from the benchmark of €240 billion in 2020 to €640 billion in 2030. This growth underlines the significant economic potential that biosolutions offer Europe at local and global levels, and de It is necessary to ensure the EU’s prominent position on the world market. It also highlights the opportunity for Europe to strengthen its sustainability, resilience and competitiveness through the strategic use of bio-solutions.

The ‘Green Revolution’

The industrial biorevolution is a unique opportunity for Europe. A small biorevolution with a huge impact is underway. Advances in research and innovation in biological sciences and technology have created untapped potential for biosolutions to help Europe and the rest of the world meet some of the greatest challenges of our time.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly proving its transformative impact on biotechnology.

Biotech companies working on new bio solutions can now use AI to enrich their processes, drive innovation and explore new business models.

AI makes it possible to optimize chemical compounds, predict which ones are most likely to be effective, and reduce the number of compounds that need to be tested in the laboratory. This significantly reduces the time required to produce new drugs.

Layer in Machine Learning (ML) to streamline clinical trials by identifying patient populations most likely to benefit from a new therapy, and the global race for market share is being waged on the circuits of a microprocessor – if Europe falls behind, you need to catching up It will be extremely difficult – so it is crucial to stay on or ahead of the wave of biosolutions.

For this reason, biosolutions play an important geopolitical role.

Sustainable future

If Europe is to achieve its green goals defined in the Fit for 55 and Farm to Fork strategies, and if the Green Deal is to deliver on its promise, not least in the context of food and feed scarcity, biosolutions must be a form an integral part of the European economy. strategy for a sustainable future.

The vision is to put Europe back on track to a world where we have vastly reduced our need for fossil materials, water and arable land.

Biosolutions are already reducing environmental and climate impacts in several sectors, such as food production, industry, transport and energy supply, and can also play an important role in preserving and improving biodiversity.

Biosolutions that support biodiversity

One approach is to use innovative bio-solutions to replace the use of harmful crop protection chemicals in our food production with organic alternatives that do not harm biodiversity.

When it comes to finding solutions to the current biorevolution, we only have to scan the ceaseless expansion of our urban landscapes, where cement has emerged as an indispensable ally, but still casts a long and ominous shadow – it is an important source of CO2 emissions.

Biomason, an innovative company at the forefront of ecological engineering, offers a beacon of hope in this ecological impasse. Their groundbreaking process has a virtually negligible carbon footprint and bypasses the need for fossil fuel kilns and limestone calcination – two notorious culprits in the ecological transgressions of traditional cement production.

In this era where every step towards sustainability counts, biocement emerges not only as an alternative, but also as proof of man’s ability to reconcile with nature. It holds the promise of a structure that is both monumental in its physicality and minimal in its impact on the environment – ​​a silent revolution that echoes amid concrete jungles around the world.

And when we have built houses, offices and factories, we must feed the families and workers who inhabit them.

New genomic techniques

Selective breeding and cross-pollination have long been the means of choice to bring out desirable traits and increase crop yields, a practice that dates back millennia.

In today’s agricultural arsenal, new genomic techniques (NGTs) are the latest entrants in a variation on this age-old theme.

NGT’s advanced tools promise to do what our ancestors did, but with greater speed and precision. Unlike traditional mutagenic techniques, which relied on the indiscriminate effects of radiation or chemical exposure on seeds, NGTs offer a more targeted approach.

They allow breeders to delve into specific genes in the plant’s DNA, paving the way for the development of new, more sustainable traits, or the reintroduction of lost traits from related plants.

The consequences are profound. NGTs allow breeders to improve crops with greater precision and speed than conventional, random breeding techniques have ever allowed.

These innovative tools enable the precise and efficient development of improved plant varieties that can withstand climate change, are resistant to pests, require fewer fertilizers and pesticides or guarantee higher yields.

Essentially, NGTs have the potential to strengthen the sustainability and resilience of our crops, increase their nutritional value and processability, and support our ongoing efforts to reduce our environmental footprint.

As we enter this new era in agriculture, it is clear that these techniques can play a crucial role in shaping the future of food production, and thus European food security, global trade strategy and the stability of the democracy in a hot, dry and intensively built future.

(By Brian Maguire | Euractiv’s Advocacy Lab)

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