Many current food systems are unsustainable because they cause significant resource depletion and unacceptable environmental impacts. This problem is so severe, it can be argued that the food eaten today is equivalent to a fossil resource. The transition to sustainable food systems will require many changes but of particular importance will be the harnessing of internet technology, in the form of an ‘Internet of Food’, which offers the chance to use global resources more efficiently, to stimulate rural livelihoods, to develop systems for resilience and to facilitate responsible governance by means of computation, communication, education and trade without limits of knowledge and access. A brief analysis of the evidence of resource depletion and environmental impact associated with food production and an outline of the limitations of tools like life cycle assessment, which are used to quantify the impact of food products, indicates that the ability to combine data across the whole system from farm to human will be required in order to design sustainable food systems. Developing an Internet of Food, as a precompetitive platform on which business models can be built, much like the internet as we currently know it, will require agreed vocabularies and ontologies to be able to reason and compute across the vast amounts of data that are becoming available. The ability to compute over large amounts of data will change the way the food system is analysed and understood and will permit a transition to sustainable food systems.

Bioeconomy is proposed as a solution to reduce reliance on fossil resources. However, bioeconomy is not always inherently circular and can mimic the conventional take, make, consume, dispose linear economic model. Agricultural systems will be relied on to provide food, materials, and energy, so unless action is taken, demand for land will inevitably exceed supply. Bioeconomy will have to embrace circularity to enable production of renewable feedstocks in terms of both biomass yield and maintaining essential natural capital. The concept of biocircularity is proposed as an integrated systems approach to the sustainable production of renewable biological materials focusing on extended use, maximum reuse, recycling, and design for degradation from polymers to monomers, while avoiding the “failure” of end of life and minimizing energy demand and waste. Challenges are discussed including sustainable production and consumption; quantifying externalities; decoupling economic growth from depletion; valuing natural ecosystems; design across scales; renewable energy provision; barriers to adoption; and integration with food systems. Biocircularity offers a theoretical basis and measures of success, for implementing sustainable circular bioeconomy.

Purpose: Transition to bioeconomy requires all actors and stakeholders to measure the impact of systems that use bioresources and technologies to provision society. There are however some challenges with integrating LCA into business development and management, which have important implications for bioeconomy. There have been many LCA studies published in the twenty-first century, but the question must be answered: how useful are these LCA studies to help understand and manage transition to sustainable bioeconomy? Method: This research used a structured literature review to identify 83 bioeconomy LCA studies published from January 2006 to June 2021 (excluding bioenergy). The studies were analysed for compliance with the ISO 14044 standard, with specific reference to the goal, commissioning perspective, system boundary, function and functional unit, impact methods and categories. Results and discussions: It was found that more than 85% of the studies reviewed failed to present the required goal statement and a description of the function of the system. Nearly 13% of the studies did not define the system boundary, and only 17% included a full life cycle including raw material extraction, production, use and end-of-life stages. The majority of the LCA studies surveyed from 2006 to 2021 were either (i) not in compliance with the ISO standards or (ii) space and style limitations of the publication process prevented competent practitioners from properly conveying their work. This suggests that the value and integrity of the literature are undermined by not rigorously addressing the first and most important stage of an LCA study. Conclusion: When interpreting the results, a major shortcoming noted was that most studies did not consider the industrial symbiosis needed between feedstock, technology, primary products, side streams, downstream valorisation and long-term circularity in order to properly understand the transition pathways required. Bioeconomy technologies were imagined as displacers for feedstocks and processes to adapt business as usual, rather than as transformers of the system to a sustainable footing. Recommendation: If LCA studies are going to provide meaningful information for actors and stakeholders to assess whether a system will be able to operate sustainably, studies should include a full, integrated system, standards should be adhered to and approaches should perhaps go beyond mere eco-efficiency, or doing less harm, as these are not necessarily indicative of sustainability. Historical bioeconomy LCA studies do not provide great insight into the transition to sustainable bioeconomy.

Determining the spatial extent of peat soils is essential for measuring soil carbon (C) stocks. The Derived Irish Peat Map (DIPM) estimated the spatial extent of peat soils as 13.8% of the national area. The DIPM was derived from the Peatland Map of Ireland, CORINE and cover database (CORINE) 1990 and the General Soil Map of Ireland. This paper presents an updated version, the Derived Irish Peat Map Version 2 (DIPMV2), using the same rules-based decision tree methodology, but CORINE 2000 and the Indicative Soil Map of Ireland (ISMI) replaced CORINE 1990 and the General Soil Map of Ireland. The DIPMV2, a best-estimate, illustrates that peat soils occur more extensively than previously mapped, especially in the ‘drumlin belt’ of counties Cavan, Monaghan and Louth. The producer, user and overall accuracies are 88, 91 and 85%, respectively. This is an improvement on the DIPM (87, 84, and 85%). The DIPMV2, estimates that peat soils cover 1,466,469 ha, or 20.6%, of the national land area. The DIPM methodology may provide a long-term tool for updating national peat soil map data. It can be concluded that data for peat soils will become more important because peat has high carbon density and modifications to peat soils have implications for climate change.