Marisa Groenestege
Driving Sustainability in the Bioeconomy
Marisa Groenestege is a PhD researcher in multi-criteria sustainability assessment of innovative biomass supply systems (thesis 5.3) at the University of Hohenheim and BOKU.
My name is Marisa Groenestege, and I am originally from the Netherlands. I have a bachelors in Agriculture from the Netherlands and Canada, as well as a masters degree in Agricultural Economics from the Erasmus Mundus double degree program in ‘Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Policy Analysis’ (AFEPA) from Italy and Germany. After finishing my masters, I worked as a consultant at BTG Biomass Technology Group in the Netherlands in European research projects related to the bioeconomy.
I am currently working on my doctoral project on multi-criteria sustainability analysis of bio-based value chains. The sustainability of bio-based value chains is complex, due to conflicting trade-offs between sustainability dimensions and value chain actors with different perspectives. Multi-criteria sustainability assessments are a way to deal with this complexity, but can have limited impact in practice. They are often only communicated between experts and do not involve the actual decision-makers. My research aims at increasing the impact of such assessments by involving stakeholders throughout the assessment and communicating results in an actionable way to decision-makers.
I am working in the department of ‘Biobased resources in the bioeconomy’ at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany; as well as the Institute of Social Ecology at BOKU University in Vienna, Austria.