The European Commission announced the launching of an observatory that will gather data to follow the evolution of markets, to map EU, national and regional bioeconomy policies, research and innovation capacities, and the scale of related public and private investments.

The Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Commission's in-house science service, will be in charge of coordinating a new observatory aimed at mapping progress and measuring the impact of the development of the European Union's bioeconomy. The observatory, which is a three year project, will start in March 2013 with the aim of making the data it will collect publicly available through a dedicated web portal in 2014. In this way, the observatory will support the regional and national bioeconomy strategies now being developed by EU Member States. Recently, it was stated in a conference that a bioeconomy will require policy professionals well prepared at national and EU levels.

The new observatory will also provide a "technology watch” and “policy watch”, to follow the development of science and technology as well of policies related to the bioeconomy. The observatory should track a number of performance measures, including economic and employment indicators, innovation indicators, and measures of productivity, social wellbeing and environmental quality.

"Bioeconomy" means an economy based on a smart use of biological and renewable resources from the land and sea, as inputs to food and feed, industrial and energy production. It also covers the use of biowaste, and of bio-based processes for sustainable industries. According to the Commission, already the bioeconomy in Europe is worth an estimated €2 trillion and 22 million jobs. The Commission is considering a new public-private partnership on bio-based industries to accelerate the development of the sector. A decision is expected in June 2013.