A Philosophical Reflection on Sustainable Bioeconomy Systems Globally Orchestrated and Territorially Self-Organized

Major concerns exist about the provision of sufficient renewable resources for nourishing as first primary need, clothing, living, travelling, working and leisuring for all generations, everywhere and anytime, while preserving nature’s biodiversity. This requires a balanced view on bioeconomy, of which food accounts for more than 50%, as the ‘economisation of nature’ and the ‘ecologisation of the economy’. Globally, a new way of anthropocentric orchestration and governance is needed that allow the global bioeconomy system to adaptively and endlessly balance between the planetary and universal societal boundaries. The precautionary principle ‘protecting life on earth and its atmosphere’ – thanks to a biocentric or natural evolution – should then be respected to reach sustainability. The global bioeconomy system is holistically built up by territorially-bounded bioeconomy systems, continuously interacting, adapting and learning from a process philosophy perspective. Following logical reasoning these systems are territorialized complex adaptive systems (CAS). This allows self-organising, naturally evolving processes, and exchanging (im-)material assets in a balanced manner. The number of territorialized bioeconomy systems is hard to estimate. If power laws for CAS also hold for bioeconomy systems, and if the power is ½ (i.e. the square root), then the approximate number of territorialized systems will be 100.000 in case of 10 billion people, and 6 billion different species globally. This evokes philosophical questions about autonomy, interconnections, diversity, ethics, governance and, hence, the nature of sustainability itself. Our reasoning converges towards a new definition: ‘Sustainable Bioeconomy Systems self-organize themselves at territorialized level and are globally governed between planetary and universal societal boundaries while providing food, bio-based materials and bioenergy.