Circular Bioeconomy for improving agrifood VET institutes’ teachers’ skills and competencies
General information
Programme: Erasmus+
Action Type: KA220-VET – Cooperation partnerships in vocational education and training
Call: 2021
Field: Vocational Education and Training
Project Title: Circular Bioeconomy for improving agrifood VET institutes’ teachers’ skills and competencies
Project Acronym: Circular Bricks
Project Start Date: 15/02/2022
Project Total Duration (Months): 24
Project End Date: 14/02/2024
National Agency of the Applicant Organisation: IT01 – Agenzia Nazionale Erasmus+ – INAPP
The bioeconomy in Europe is moving from research niche to market norm as the European Commission is setting a course for a more resource-efficient and sustainable economy.
The current economic size is significant as the corresponding sectors represent an annual turnover of 2.3 trillion €, making it one of the Union’s largest sectors. Moreover, it already employs around 8.2% of the EU workforce and has the potential to further increase.
The EU, with the Bioeconomy Strategy 2018, the Circular Economy Action Plan 2020 and the Farm to Fork Strategy (at the heart of the EU Green Deal), aims to prompt the development, production and use of renewable resources to make food & feed, energy, materials and chemicals, paving the way to a more innovative, resource-efficient and competitive society, based on circular bioeconomy principles.
However, in order to reap the benefits of this socio-economic model, both a well-trained workforce and correctly informed customers are essential. Indeed, one of the priorities of the EU Bioeconomy Strategy is to promote education, training and skills across the bioeconomy. Since the bioeconomy is a broad high-level concept, it requires the integration of a large number of scientific disciplines, but also a cohesive vision involving economy, society and lifelong learning.
To help train and educate the new generation of bioeconomy professionals with the necessary hard and soft skills, we need to rethink and improve our current educational model for the bioeconomy. This is the long-term ambition of Circular Bricks.
Across Europe, some initiatives have already been put in place. However, there seems to be a lack of generalized and consistent schemes, especially with regards to the VET field.
In Italy, bioeconomy has received increasing attention in recent years. The Government plans to accelerate the transition towards a more circular and sustainable economy with the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, in response to the COVID-19 crisis. In January 2021, it also presented the 2020-2025 Implementation Action Plan for the Italian Bioeconomy Strategy which sets four operational lines of action (two of them are directly aimed at reinforcing education, training and entrepreneurship in the field of bioeconomy).
Spain launched its own strategy on bioeconomy in January 2016, with the aim to make it an essential part of the Spanish economy, able to contribute to the economic growth by creating new jobs and fostering investments.
A strategy on bioeconomy has not yet been released for Romania, but there are various ongoing policy initiatives toward bioeconomy (e.g. bioeconomy was identified as one of the smart specialization areas in the Romanian National Strategy for Research Development and Innovation 2014-2020).
Greece does not have a specific National strategy for bioeconomy yet, but the Greek government assigns a high priority to resource efficiency as well as energy-efficient and low carbon investments and several initiatives have already been implemented (e.g. the Greek Bio-economy Forum).
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