Modelling of the bioeconomy system using interpretive structural modelling

ArticleDue to European and global resource efficiency efforts, the bioeconomy research and the search for new bioresource valorisation alternatives has become topical. Bioeconomy directly concerns such major sectors of the economy as agriculture, forestry, fishery, as well as other indirect bioeconomy sectors. However, the practical implementation of bioeconomy has had quite low implementation rate, which is partly caused by the multitude and variety of factors that affect the bioeconomy system. This paper evaluates seven bioeconomy affecting factors (particularly related to biotechonomy concept) and links between them in order to promote successful implementation of bioeconomy. To evaluate these factors interpretive structural modelling method (ISM) is used. The application of ISM method allows to not only identify the factor interaction links, but also to graphically represent their directed structure. The results show that three out of seven factors have the strongest interrelation, namely, climate change, bioresources and technologies. This research can be complimented by further adding other factors that could be influencing for bioeconomy development, for example, financial resources, human health, well-being, and so on; therefore, to reach better understanding about influential factors and bioeconomy dependency on them; also, system dynamics approach could be used in order to fully uncover the factor interaction links