Forestry is a potential pathway to strengthening European competitiveness, reducing dependence on non-renewable, unsustainable resources, enhancing the circular bioeconomy, and understanding the bioeconomy’s ecological boundaries. Europe’s forests and their value chains, however, face diverse challenges, including increasing global wood demand, biodiversity loss, and increasing biotic and abiotic threats to forest health and economic revenue caused by climate change. OptiForValue’s ultimate goal is to foster transition to more sustainable and resilient forest-based value chains, by using a unique, interconnected modelling framework involving strong participative engagement and novel scientific approaches, including early warning indicators of biotic and abiotic risks, adaptive forest management strategies, remote sensing and artificial intelligence for agile forest operations, and integrated value-chain optimisation and life cycle assessments. The expected outcomes include increased value addition, competitiveness, sustainability, and resilience of European forest-based value chains, particularly in regions already or forecast to be impacted by climate change over the coming decades. OptiForValue will accelerate this transition by enhancing the sustainability, resilience, and profitability of regional value chains in Central European, Mediterranean and boreal, via case studies in Austria, Spain, Sweden, Finland. Significant long-term impacts are expected to be achieved, including a 10% reduction in wood damage, with a subsequent increase in wood harvesting (€240 M annually), 3% value addition from better quality control (€350 M annually), 5% increase in the forestry workforce in areas affected by climate change, and 5–10% reduction in fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The consortium’s research institutes, universities and companies are well equipped to advance the state of the art, validate solutions through case studies, and upscale results.

Biodiversity is the true driving force of a sustainable, circular bioeconomy (CBE). While the CBE needs advanced technology and innovation to succeed, biodiversity determines the capacity of biological systems to adapt and evolve. For this reason, biodiversity considerations need to be reflected in economic practices and valuation. CircHive will measure and integrate the value of nature into public and business decision making by: 1) improving data availability, accessibility, and harmonisation; 2) developing a standardised method for biodiversity footprinting (BF) and integrating it with natural capital accounting (NCA); 3) mainstreaming the use of BF and NCA in public and private decision making, incl. improving disclosure, risk management, and investment practice; 4) testing and improving the developed methods and models; and 5) building a wider community ‘BEEHive’ for peer support and exploitation of results. A strong emphasis is put developing scientifically robust and standardised methods that bridge BF (life cycle analyses) and NCA (bookkeeping), given their multiple overlaps but also divergences that hinder operationalisation and uptake. An equally strong emphasis is placed on practice-testing to understand current practices and opportunities for further mainstreaming of biodiversity and natural capital into disclosure, ecolabelling, and investment decisions. Transitioning theory to practice is put to the test via a case study network who will apply different biodiversity-centric approaches in real life. This is carried out in sectoral case study hubs (industry, retailers, investors, cities) for peer learning and capacity building. In CircHive’s approach, CBE and biodiversity reinforce each other as a basis for resources and inspiration for sustainable business practices. The integration of the value of nature into public and business decisions, will benefit both the protection of ecosystems and their services and the profitability of sustainable businesses.

The importance of biodiversity (BD) and healthy ecosystems and the services they deliver has increasingly been acknowledged. Policy initiatives, such as the EU BD Strategies 2020 and 2030, IPBES, IPCC and CBD were launched to address BD, natural capital and related values. Research has created a knowledge base to better understand nature-human interactions that are at the base of ecosystem services (ES) delivery. The key aim of related actions is to provide robust information that can be harnessed to support protection, restoration and sustainable as well as climate-neutral use of ecosystems in the EU by 2030. MAES has provided the conceptual, methodological and data base for comprehensive assessments on different spatial scales, including the EU-wide assessment (2020) and assessments in EU member states. Knowledge and data for different ecosystem types (including protected and marine areas) are increasingly available. The next step is to integrate the different MAES components (ecosystem mapping, condition, ES, accounting) and to enable the uptake of ES in decision making. Key challenges include the proof of BD-ecosystem condition-ES relationships and to link them to EU policies. The consortium brings together experts from all EU member states, associated countries and EU overseas regions with stakeholders from various public and private sectors. The expertise in the consortium includes leading experts (ecologists, economists, social scientists) on ES science, ecosystem accounting and on science-policy-business interfaces from related actions (OpenNESS, ESMERALDA, MAIA, MAES, ESP, IPBES, BD Partnership). Therefore, the project will successfully address the call's challenges and provide applicable tools and models together with guidance how to use them. The project will deliver real cases for an evidence-, ES-based and harmonised decision making across Europe, enabling transformative change to halt BD decline and to secure essential ES-sustainable supply and use.