Europe’s biosolutions sector is leveraging nature to strengthen sustainability and resilience

Biosolutions are nature’s tools, offering a powerful pathway to accelerate the transition towards a sustainable and greener future, while potentially 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 scaling of enzymes to accelerate some manufacturing processes while saving water, energy, and raw materials. The genetic modification of microorganisms to produce high-value products such as nutrients, bio-pheromones, and biomaterials through precision fermentation.

Though the sector is not new, there is a vibrant emerging biosolutions market stretching far beyond pharmaceuticals to include the development of renewable energy and fuel, creating bio-based solutions for industries and applications.

Seed treatments for agriculture are a growing biosolutions sector, for example, with Poncho® Votivo® 2.0 a leading and vibrant product. It’s a combination of two bacterial strains carefully applied to seeds. One creates a living barrier around the seed that prevents damage from harmful soil-dwelling bugs that would feed on the small, vulnerable roots of a young plant.

This kind 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 leveraging the potential of nature’s own tools.

The value of the world markets for biosolutions (including the European market) could surge from the €240 billion benchmark in 2020 to €640 billion in 2030. This growth underscores the significant economic potential biosolutions offer Europe at a local and global level, and the need to ensure the EU’s prominence on the world market. It also highlights the opportunity for Europe to strengthen its sustainability, resilience, and competitiveness through the strategic use of biosolutions.

The ‘Green Revolution’

The industrial bio-revolution is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Europe. A tiny bio revolution with a huge impact is underway. Progress within research and innovation in biological sciences and technology has created an untapped potential for biosolutions to help Europe and the rest of the world meet some of the biggest challenges of our time.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is proving, at speed, that it has a transformative impact on biotechnology.

Biotech companies working on novel biosolutions can now leverage AI to enrich their processes, drive innovation, and explore new business models.

AI allows for optimizing chemical compounds, predicting which ones are most likely to be effective, and reducing the number of compounds that need to be tested in the lab. This significantly reduces the time taken to produce new drugs.

Layer in Machine Learning (ML) to streamline clinical trials by identifying patient populations that are most likely to benefit from a new therapy, and we see that the global race for market share is being conducted on the circuits of a microprocessor – if Europe falls behind, catch-up will be monumentally difficult – so staying on or ahead of the biosolutions curve is critical.

For this reason, biosolutions have a significant geopolitical role.

Sustainable future

If Europe is to meet its green goals defined in the Fit for 55 and Farm to Fork strategies, and if the Green Deal is to fulfil its promise, not least in the context of food and feed scarceness, biosolutions must be an integral part of Europe’s strategy for a sustainable future.

The vision is to bring 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 impact in various sectors such as food production, industry, transport, and energy supply, and they can also play a significant role in preserving and enhancing biodiversity.

One approach is to deploy innovative biosolutions to replace the use of harmful chemicals for crop protection in our food production, with biological alternatives that do not harm biodiversity.

Low-carbon concrete jungle 

When it comes to finding solutions for today’s bio revolution we just need 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 a significant source of CO2 emissions.

Biomason, an innovative company at the forefront of ecological engineering, offers a beacon of hope in this environmental impasse. Their pioneering process presents an almost negligible carbon footprint, sidestepping the need for fossil fuel-fired furnaces and the calcination of limestone – two notorious culprits in traditional cement production’s environmental transgressions.

In this era where every step towards sustainability counts, biocement emerges not just as an alternative but as a testament to human ingenuity’s capacity to reconcile with nature. It holds the promise of construction that is both monumental in its physicality and minimal in its environmental impact—a silent revolution echoing amidst concrete jungles worldwide.

And when we have built homes, offices and factories, we must feed the families and workers that occupy them.

New genomic techniques

Selective breeding and cross-pollination have long been the tools of choice to coax out desirable traits and boost crop yields, a practice going back millennia.

In today’s agricultural arsenal, New Genomic Techniques (NGTs) are the latest entrants in a variation on this ancient theme.

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

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

The implications are profound. With NGTs, breeders can enhance crops with greater precision and speed than conventional, random breeding techniques ever allowed.

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

In essence, NGTs hold the potential to bolster the sustainability and resilience of our crops, enhance their nutritional value and processability, and support our ongoing efforts to reduce our carbon footprint.

As we stand on the cusp of this new era in agriculture, it is clear that these techniques could play a crucial role in shaping the future of food production, and therefore Europe’s food security, its global trade strategy, and the stability of democracy in a hot, dry and intensely farmed future.

[By Brian Maguire | Euractiv’s Advocacy Lab ]

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