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.

Being one of the main actions of the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030, the European Biodiversity Partnership (Biodiversa+) will coordinate research programmes between EU and its Member States and Associated Countries, mobilising environmental authorities as key partners for implementing biodiversity research and innovation, along with ministries of research, funding organisations, and environmental protection agencies (75 organisations from 37 countries). Biodiversa+ has five overarching objectives: (1) improve monitoring of biodiversity and ecosystem services across Europe (status and trends); (2) generate actionable knowledge to tackle the direct and indirect drivers of biodiversity loss; (3) expand and improve the evidence base, and accelerate the development and wide deployment of NbS to meet societal challenges across Europe; (4) make the business case for the conservation and restoration of biodiversity; and (5) ensure efficient science-based support for biodiversity policy making in Europe. Biodiversa+ will meet these objectives by (i) setting up a pan-European network of harmonized monitoring schemes, building on existing national/regional monitoring schemes, creating capacity for setting up new schemes, and feeding into the EC Knowledge Center for Biodiversity; (ii) coordinating research programmes between the EU and its Member States and associated countries, thereby ensuring the long-term pan-European research agenda is co-created and implemented; (iii) contributing science-based methodologies to account for and possibly value ecosystem services and the natural capital, and to assess the dependency and impact of businesses on biodiversity and (iv) better linking of R&I programmes to the policy arena, providing greater input to policy making and improving the assessment of policy efficiency. Doing so, Biodiversa+ will help ensure that, by 2030, nature in Europe is back on a path of recovery, and by 2050 people are living in harmony with Nature.