Our global economy is intrinsically dependent on nature, and at the same time is playing a major role in its degradation. Recognition of this fact has grown substantially in the past decade, as evidenced in the EU Biodiversity strategy for 2030. However, transformative, system-wide changes are still needed to achieve the nature-positive outcomes required to 'bend the curve' of biodiversity loss. While the business case for economic actors to address biodiversity is becoming clearer in some sectors, it is still lacking in others, particularly those more removed from direct interactions with nature. SUSTAIN (Strengthening Understanding and Strategies of business To Assess and Integrate Nature) will bring together a multi-stakeholder and multi-disciplinary team to strengthen understanding and awareness of how all economic activities depend and impact on biodiversity. The project will build on existing work within the business and biodiversity space to develop and validate a database of business dependencies and impacts, develop methods that actors can use to reduce biodiversity-related risks, and a toolbox to support their application. The consortium will drive uptake of these resources through dissemination of targeted business case materials, drawing on existing networks and expertise in communicating with businesses, financial institutions and other key stakeholders.

NetworkNature+ will continue NetworkNature’s legacy as a ‘network of networks’ and expand it to engage new audiences in addressing the societal challenges outlined by the EU. It will maintain and enhance the established evidence/demand/policy-driven multi-stakeholder platform for NBS, strengthening partnerships and fostering new relationships around a clear strategic framework for action, underpinned by an updated EU Research & Innovation NBS Roadmap and complementary analysis of policy opportunities for integrating NBS at EU, Member State, regional and local level in view of EU 2030 policy targets and EU Missions. NetworkNature+ will provide scientific NBS insights across selected policy priorities and different European and international contexts. This will guide our work around dialogue, stakeholder interactions, knowledge sharing and awareness raising, resulting in products, standards and advisory services that support the growing NBS community of innovators, practitioners and developers. A targeted training and capacity building programme will promote a step change from siloed, project-based thinking towards an integrated, systemic and stakeholder-led approach to NBS planning, design and investment, while leveraging the role of ecosystems as critical infrastructure that support regenerative economic activities and help reduce biodiversity loss. We will enable regional and Europe-wide transdisciplinary collaboration to answer identified R&I needs for NBS via knowledge exchange between EU-funded NBS R&I projects and stakeholders, together with skills development and capacity building for target groups from science, policy, business and society. International collaboration with key strategic partners (e.g. UNCBD, IPBES, IPCC, UNFCCC, UNEP, UNDRR) and selected regions will enable European expertise to inform the global NBS discourse, contributing to the EC’s vision of “a stronger Europe in the world” and supporting new investments for NBS.

Terra Nova: The New Learning Initiative between Humanities and Science: Mapping Past Environments and Energy Regimes, Rethinking Human Environment Interaction and Designing Land Management Tools for Policy. This project aims at improving our diachronic long term understanding of landscape histories and land use strategies in Europe in the Holocene and Anthropocene. Previously identified socio-cultural transitions and the effects of natural forcings will be critically assessed in a new intellectual interdisciplinary arena created by the Terra Nova project. Regional and continental syntheses will be used to anchor a new generation of landscape and climate change models which include the effects of past human actions and generate scenarios for landscape management and rewilding. Ultimately this project will contribute to identifying major previous shifts in resource use and energy regimes and provide options for the future transition to a low carbon society. Can we identify a balance between natural and cultural landscapes changing over space and time? Can we establish a natural reference for ‘European landscapes’ to evaluate current and future measures of landscape planning, ecosystem restoration and rewilding? Or are both systems so intertwined that the separation of the human from the natural is complex and scale and time dependant? Some researchers mark the industrial revolution as the start of the Anthropocene, others argue that long ago humans in Europe had a larger influence than natural processes upon the landscape. Notwithstanding these differences, there is consensus that the intensity of management and impacts of land management on natural systems today is unprecedented. This leads on to consideration of themes of sustainability and societal impact upon landscapes in the 21st century. From this perspective knowledge of past energy regimes and landscape interactions are essential components in understanding the present transition to a low carbon society.

The ECO-READY project will develop a real-time surveillance system, an Observatory offered as an e-platform and as a mobile application. This will function as the necessary singular source of information, provide real-time assessments for the food system, and update forecasts frequently and consistently. The Observatory will be available to society, policymakers, the scientific community, and the agri-food industry, and integrated with a network of 10 Living Labs, supported through the third party funding process, covering all bioclimatic regions in Europe, forming the ECO-READY project knowledge infrastructure. ECO-READY will produce knowledge-based resilience strategies, and develop tools that will be embedded on the Observatory. The underlining principle behind the ECO-READY approach is, resilient dynamism, or tackling immediate problems and long-term challenges at the same time. The Living Labs network will facilitate ‘concept to action’ through the co-creation of scenarios addressing their regional needs, the development of policy recommendations, contingency plans, and resilience strategies, and embed them on the Observatory. Furthermore, ECO-READY will develop an early warning system and decision support tools using innovative Artificial Intelligence based on holistic prediction models and Life Cycle Assessment results. ECO-READY will ensure that European farmers and society’s interests be reflected in future policy-making and monitoring, through early-stage active engagement incorporating bottom-up recommendations, facilitated by the increased usership of the digital tools developed, and resulting in increased awareness for climate-adaptive and mitigating agri-food products. Furthermore, the Observatory smart application will include tools that will empower the citizens to actively engage in policy making, and interact directly with the scientific community, farmers, and industry and policy makers, thus driving change in consumption habits.

The European Union aims to reduce net carbon emissions by 55% in 2030, and become climate neutral by 2050. These goals can only be met if it boosts carbon storage in terrestrial ecosystems, preferably while fostering socio-environmental co-benefits such as conserving biodiversity, adapting to climate change, and safeguarding socio-economic and cultural values. Both the IPCC and the IPBES have emphasised the great potential of ecosystem restoration and related nature-based solutions (NbS) for addressing the challenge. wildE introduces ‘climate-smart rewilding’ as an innovative restoration approach to create climate benefits while also addressing other socio-environmental needs. The project gathers a multi-disciplinary team of leading European experts to develop a research and innovation programme addressing the climate-biodiversity nexus in tight association with the socio-economic dimension of large-scale restoration. The team will also project scenarios to assess Europe’s rewilding potentials under diverse land-use and climate change futures. wildE will (i) generate comprehensive case-comparative data on European rewilding trends and outcomes, (ii) quantify the net social, economic and environmental benefits, synergies and trade-offs related to rewilding and alternative land-use options; (iii) develop cutting-edge projections for future land use and climate scenarios; and (iv) develop tangible and readily accessible decision-support and management guidelines to enable policymakers, conservation managers, communities, and the private sector to co-construct climate-smart rewilding strategies as effective NbS for meeting the EU’s climate and biodiversity targets. Embedded within an ambitious stakeholder engagement, communications programme, wildE research will enable climate-smart rewilding as operational large-scale NbS to effectively foster the natural capacity of Europe’s ecosystems for climate change mitigation, adaptation and biodiversity support.