Agata Kotkowska, European Commission

Agata Kotkowska is Deputy Head of the Bioeconomy and Sustainable Materials Unit at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Environment. She works at the intersection of industrial policy, sustainability and competitiveness, focusing on scaling sustainable value chains and investment frameworks. She is a Senior Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, where her research explores financial innovation in sustainable capital markets, including blended finance, guarantees and investment mobilisation for the green transition. Her work combines policy leadership with an economic perspective on accelerating the transition to a competitive and sustainable economy.

What would you like to contribute to the conference?

– The EU Bioeconomy Strategy has shifted decisively from innovation to deployment and the funding, market-creation and regulatory instruments to scale first-of-a-kind biorefineries are now in place. Closing the investment gap depends on regional ecosystems engaging directly with these mechanisms to turn bio-based potential into bankable, industrial-scale reality.