Forest bioeconomy in Ontario – A policy discussion

Abstract

Ontario's forest sector has been undergoing a significant structural shift resulting from a more than decade-long trend of declining markets for traditional products. Though there have been signs of industry recovery, the forestry industry is still far smaller than it once was. In order to sustain and improve Ontario's economic position, we must develop policies and supporting programs that transition our forest economy to a more robust and diverse set of markets, including capitalizing on opportunities that come from a thriving and sustainable forest bioeconomy. The current suite of programs is fragmented and does not provide support for all types of bioproducts and policy initiatives, nor across all sections of the value chain. These factors, coupled with the lack of a clear strategic direction for the bioeconomy, have contributed to Ontario's slow emergence into the bioeconomy when compared to other jurisdictions. It is proposed that a key way to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of policy support for the emerging bioeconomy is to integrate and coordinate the actions of the government with industry and academia players involved in the bioproducts sector. Forest policy needs to take a balanced, integrated approach to promote all aspects of the bioeconomy to help ensure the eventual success of Ontario's forest bioeconomy.

Towards a Global Framework for Analysing the Forest-Based Bioeconomy

“…The dominant paradigms in the forest-based bioeconomy literature (outside the biotechnology approach) are eco-modernism [19,27,40,66] and neo-industrialisation [27,40,53]. It is also widely acknowledged that the transition to a bioeconomy is only possible in an optimum policy environment [34,45,67,68], preventing lock-in, i.e., the situation where the forest-based bioeconomy stagnates due to a lead firm's dominant market position, the advantage of economy of scale, and the pseudo-irreversibility of investments [54], blocking innovation and freezing actor coalitions [45]. In addition, individual policies seldom expose the existing regime [69] to enough transformation for systemic changes to occur, in this case towards a bioeconomy [45].…”

Contribution of Biomass Supply Chains for Bioenergy to Sustainable Development Goals

“…SDG 16 may work to enable bioenergy development if progress toward developing effective, inclusive, and transparent institutions and governance regimes is achieved (targets 16.6, 16.7, 16.8) [23,51]. The development of locally governed, community-scale bioenergy projects may lead to increase opportunities for participation in local decisionmaking [47,58,107]. SDG 17 may also enable bioenergy development and establishments of sustainable biomass supply chains through several targets related to finance, technology and capacitybuilding, and cross-sectoral partnerships [21,23,108,109].…”

Forest Bioeconomy and Sustainable Development Goals

“…Finland (Kröger and Raitio, 2017) and Ontario, Canada (Majumdar et al, 2017). To foster forest bioeconomy, integrated approach with other sectors (Majumdar et al, 2017), challenges and opportunities of bio-based products and policy instruments including labelling (Scarlat et al, 2015) were recommended. Discourse on bioeconomy represented in academic articles shows dominantly economic aspect and neglects social considerations (Pülzl et al, 2014).…”