The European Green Deal's transition towards a circular, bio-based economy will increase biomass demand for food, feed, bioenergy, biochemicals, and materials. This creates severe pressures on land and sea and trade-offs between food security, biodiversity, climate mitigation, and rural livelihoods. Existing approaches treat land and sea systems in silos, struggle to connect stakeholder-driven narratives with quantitative modelling, and evaluate policy instruments in isolation. Building on the JRC's Integrated Bioeconomy Land Use Assessment, BALANSED bridges the land–sea divide by linking integrated models with participatory tools and embedding policy mixes within deliberative processes. This identifies feasible, viable, and socially desirable land, sea, and biomass uses across scales.

The BALANSED project objectives are to:

  • Review European Green Deal policy mixes and ambitions, and identify the tools, knowledge, and deliberative processes needed for comprehensive land, sea, and biomass assessments.
  • Develop and test deliberation processes that combine qualitative policy narratives with participatory tools, enabling inclusive stakeholder engagement and co-design of sustainable bioeconomy pathways.
  • Translate qualitative policy narratives into quantitative regional assessments through modelling and indicator frameworks that quantify trade-offs and synergies across environmental, economic, and social dimensions.
  • Demonstrate the modelling, indicator, and deliberation frameworks in six local study regions and two cross-regional study regions: the EU27 and the Mediterranean.
  • Develop harmonized data packages, cross-sectoral indicators, and interoperable data infrastructure aligned with FAIR principles, JRC Knowledge Centres, IBLUA, and relevant EU data spaces.
  • Formulate policy recommendations, policy briefs, a final roadmap, and a deliberation toolkit to support future regional policymaking on sustainable land, sea, and biomass use.

 

Key Features

  • Deliberation at the centre: multi-level participatory processes are combined with quantitative storytelling, multi-criteria analysis and Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping.
  • Land–sea integration: the project bridges terrestrial and marine systems that are usually assessed separately.
  • Policy mixes: the project co-develops and tests combinations of regulatory, market-based and voluntary instruments aligned with the European Green Deal.
  • Regional testing, EU upscaling: the work runs in six local study regions:
    • La Mancha (southern Spain)
    • Castilla y León (northern Spain)
    • Plovdiv (Bulgaria)
    • Slovenia
    • the Northern Adriatic Sea (Italy, Slovenia, Croatia)
    • Võru (Estonia)

It is then scaled up through two cross-regional studies, one for the EU27 and one for the Mediterranean.

IIASA's Role and Responsibilities:

IIASA leads Work Package 5 on comprehensive scenario assessment of land, sea, and biomass use, and Task 4.3 on filling terrestrial and marine biomass data gaps. The role of IIASA IIASA contributes systems analysis, land-use and biomass modelling expertise, and experience in quantitative storytelling for sustainability transitions. The emphasis is on how BALANSED connects stakeholder-informed policy narratives with integrated assessment, spatial modelling, biomass resource analysis, and trade-off evaluation.

 

The work is carried out by three IIASA research groups:

  • The AFE group extends BeWhere to assess land–sea renewable energy expansion, integrating offshore wind, biomass, and infrastructure constraints, including protected and conserved areas.
  • The IBF group enhances GLOBIOM to include marine biomass and align land biomass supply with demand under sustainability constraints and Safe and Just Operating Space indicators.
  • The NODES group will support the design of the indicator framework, data inventory, data harmonization, and infrastructure development. NODES also leads the task on filling terrestrial and marine biomass data gaps, including the integration of biophysical and socio-economic datasets, citizen-science and crowdsourcing approaches, community-based monitoring, and alignment with infrastructures such as Copernicus, EMODnet, FAOSTAT, JRC Knowledge Centres, and IBLUA.

 

Project partners:

  1. Wageningen Research Foundation (WR)
  2. GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences (GFZ)
  3. Wageningen University (WU)
  4. National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (OGS)
  5. Pensoft Publishers (PENSOFT)
  6. Agri-food Cooperatives of Spain, Cooperative Society (CoopsAgroES)
    6.1 Regional Union of Agricultural Cooperatives of Castilla y León (URCACYL)
    6.2 Agri-food Cooperatives of Castilla-La Mancha (CALCM)
  7. Society for Territorial and Environmental Prosperity (STEP)
  8. Slovenian Forestry Institute (GIS)
  9. Slovenia Forest Service (SFS)
  10. Centre of Ecological Technologies (CEET)

 

BALANSED is funded under the European Union's Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme.  Grant agreement number: 101296065.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

Funded by the European Union