A very warm welcome to the 28^th European Biomass Conference and Exhibition (EUBCE) to be held in Marseille, France, from 27^th to 30^th of April 2020.

On behalf of the Scientific Committee, it is a great pleasure to invite you to be part of this world leading event for the biomass sector, a global forum for exchange knowledge and information on the latest technological developments and innovative biomass applications.

The European Union (EU) is well committed to the fight against Climate Change and is on track to meet the ambitious Paris Agreement goals and 2030 targets. But we need to go further and faster and be more ambitious to reach climate neutrality in 2050. Innovation is needed for delivering the Paris targets. Ursula von der Leyen, the new European Commission president, pledged for a “European Green Deal” to make EU a climate-neutral economy by 2050. To help finance this transition away from fossil fuels economy, a strategy for green financing and a sustainable investment plan would ensure 1 trillion euros of investments over the next decade through a European “Climate Bank”.

While all sectors and technologies have a role to play in this endeavour, bioenergy, as part of a new, modern, emerging bioeconomy, could have an essential contribution to reach climate neutrality by 2050. Besides contributing to greenhouse gas reduction, bioenergy brings additional social, environmental and economic benefits to agriculture, forestry and other industrial sectors, driving rural development, in the context of sustainable development. While a number of new, emerging, innovative bioenergy technologies approach maturity, further effort is needed to enable promising technologies to reach commercial operation.

EUBCE proposes for 2020 a programme that addresses and responds to the present-days challenges and opportunities for the whole biomass sector. The 2020 programme includes a refined topic and subtopic structure, responding to the suggestions from the scientific community and to the observed trends in biomass technologies, ranging from cutting edge research, policies, markets and sustainability to industrial applications. The new, emerging, innovative technologies are important to address as that could have a significant impact on the take-off on the bioeconomy. In particular, in 2020, the conference will dig deeper into the structure, components and role of the emerging bioeconomy, explore the role of agriculture in bioenergy production for energy and bioeconomy transition and seek improving citizen awareness and engagement in support of biomass technologies.

I warmly encourage you to submit your abstract and participate at the EUBCE 2020 in Marseille. I invite you to carefully read the topic descriptions and select your abstract for the topic which most closely matches the key novelty of their work. The scientific committee, composed of recognised experts from the global biomass community, is committed to review and select the best papers in a high scientific level conference programme.

Dr. Nicolae Scarlat
European Commission, Joint Research Centre
EUBCE Technical Programme Chairman