EU launching a bio-economy observatory

This looks like an interesting development for the bio-economy in the EU. The European Commission will establish an observatory to map progress and measure the impact of the development of the EU bio-economy. The observatory will gather data to follow the evolution of markets, to map EU, national and regional bio-economy policies, research and innovation capacities, and the scale of related public and private investments. The observatory, which is a 3 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 bio-economy strategies now being developed by EU Member States. As well as providing data on the size of the bioeconomy and its constituent sectors 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. It 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. This forms part of many activities now underway on the bio-economy supported by the European Commission.