Forest-based materials: How to transform the bioeconomy to beat the planetary crisis

Linnea Cederholm, one of the SUCCeSS affiliated postdocs, has been awarded a research grant from Mistra, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research. Her research project will explore ‘sufficiency’ and its implications for the forest-based bioeconomy.

“One of the large societal challenges of today is to break the cycle of ever-increasing natural resource extraction, seeing this being linked to climate change as well as biodiversity loss and pollution. This a challenge also when it comes to forest-based materials. Because even if the forest is a source of renewable materials, it is limited.  As a society, we should ask ourselves we want the forest to be used for.”, says Linnea Cederholm. “In this project, we will, explore what ‘sufficiency’ could look like in the bioeconomy context, with the purpose to examine the role of forest-based materials in the sustainability transition.

Researchers from three different departments at the Stockholm University (Department of Chemistry, Department of Environmental Science and Stockholm Resilience Centre) will participate in the project, a collaboration that was initiated in 2023 through SUCCeSS. The new Mistra project, led by Linnea Cederholm, will kick-off in September 2025 and will run over three years.