This interactive online session will show how coal-phase out regions like Germany’s Rhenish mining area and Greece’s Western Macedonia - together with EU Horizon Europe projects such as BIO2REG, BIOTRANSFORM, and BIO-INSPIRE - are using regional strengths, bioeconomy solutions, and strong community engagement to drive just and sustainable transitions in agriculture, industry, energy and more. Short impulse talks will be followed by an open discussion on creating jobs, restoring environments, and offering new prospects in regions moving away from coal or cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
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- Climate and environment | Jobs and Employment | Local and regional
- Code: Side253588
- Online Session
Practical information
- When
-
Thu 30/10/2025, 13:00 - 14:30 CET
- Where
- Online Session
- Type of partnership
- EURegionsWeek close to you
- Format
- Side
- Theme
-
The Right to Stay: unlocking the potential of every territory
- Language
- English
Partners
Cluster of Bioeconomy and Environment of Western Macedonia (Clube)
University Research Institute of Urban Environment and Human Resources- Panteion University
Reporting
Session summary
Starting point are regions and their realities. Both showcased coal regions, Germany’s Rhenish mining area and Greece’s Western Macedonia, face major structural change due to lignite phase-out, with significant employment and land-use legacies. Transition strategies need to start from these regional profiles, strengths and constraints, not from one-size-fits-all models.
Bioeconomy as a practical just-transition pathway was presented as a route from brown to green growth, creating new value chains and jobs while using local biomass, skills, and industrial infrastructure. It was showcased that in the two coal regions it can become the innovation core of transformation if anchored in regional strengths.
Regional and public authorities must be inside the ecosystem. Western Macedonia’s CluBE model shows a quintuple-helix cooperation platform explicitly including the public sector alongside academia, SMEs/industry, environmental entrepreneurship and social actors. The session highlighted that having regional/public authorities as active members (not just observers) helps align funding, spatial planning, skills policy, and citizen engagement with bioeconomy investments.
Aiming for a realistic activation level by understanding that transformation is participatory, but not everyone will engage at once. Success comes from activating a critical mass of motivated regional actors, demonstrating early wins (pilots, living labs, local initiatives) and then widening involvement step-by-step.
Regions learning from each other is the multiplier. BIO2REG’s “regions-to-regions” approach responds to a common bottleneck: regional actors often lack actionable knowledge to turn strategies into real action. Peer exchange, mentoring, provided tools and resources and cross-regional dialogue were confirmed as highly valued by participants and seen as essential for scaling bioeconomy transitions across Europe.
