European Commission, Directorate-General for Environment, Publications Office of the European Union, 2024.

The main objective of this financing guide is to provide information to stakeholders interested in finding (additional) funding sources for their tree planting initiatives and, potentially, in being registered in the EU tree counter devoted to the EU pledge. The guide can also be useful to anyone interested in implementation of projects with tree planting components or in implementation of projects with a broader scope relating to biodiversity and nature protection, in particular at the intersection with forestry, urban and agricultural land use planning.

European Commission: Directorate-General for Environment, BIOCLIMA – Assessing land use, climate and biodiversity impacts of land-based climate mitigation and biodiversity policies in the EU – Technical report, Publications Office of the European Union, 2024.

The EU Fit for 55 Package and the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, have underscored the role that the agriculture and forestry sectors will have in tackling climate change, protecting the environment and preserving or restoring biodiversity. Exploratory scenario analyses in the ‘Clean Planet for All ’ Communication identified important linkages between these objectives that could be synergistic but also antagonistic, depending on the land-use policies applied and their geographic location.

European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Prakash, S., Estreguil, C., et al., Publications Office of the European Union, 2023

Biodiversity and health are inextricably connected, directly as well as indirectly. Nature and biodiversity directly enhance health and wellbeing by improving the quality of our air, water and soil, and providing indispensable medicines, food and nutrients. Anthropogenic drivers of biodiversity loss and ecosystem change such as pollution, agricultural intensification and climate change affect both biodiversity and health, and are in turn aggravated by the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services.

European Commission: Joint Research Centre, Neuville, A., Périer, H. and Barbuto, F., Building an EU biodiversity financing indicator, Publications Office of the European Union, 2024.

The EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 states that "at least €20 billion a year should be unlocked for spending on nature" through mobilising private and public funding at national and EU level. This report assesses the feasibility of building an indicator to monitor progress towards this commitment. A proposal for an annual indicator is presented, focusing on biodiversity-related finance mobilised through EU funds and instruments, which is tracked in a broadly consistent way. It includes three components: financing from EU budget funds, Member State co-financing, and private and public financing mobilised through InvestEU, the most important EU repayable support instrument.

European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, Publications Office of the European Union, 2023.

The world’s oceans, which feed us, regulate our climate and generate much of the oxygen we breathe, are threatened by human activities. EU-funded projects are therefore working to protect marine ecosystems and conserve their biodiversity. This CORDIS esults Pack focuses on 11 projects funded under the EU’s Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe research programmes. These prove the need for biodiversity and ecosystem services research to ensure Europe’s environmental sustainability, and the relevance of such initiatives for current and future policy objectives.

European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, Publications Office of the European Union. Publications Office of the European Union, 2024.

The ocean covers more than 70 % of the Earth’s surface and contains nearly 80 % of all life. As a source of oxygen, food, and employment, it supports billions of people, and also forms the planet’s largest carbon sink. This new Results Pack highlights 13 EU-funded research projects, amongst multiple other research efforts in ocean observing and show how they are essential for the sustainable management of the ocean.

European Commission: Joint Research Centre, Van de Bund, W., Bartkova, T., Belka, K., Bussettini, M. et al., Criteria for identifying free-flowing river stretches for the EU biodiversity strategy for 2030, Publications Office of the European Union, 2024.

The EU Biodiversity Strategy includes the target that at least 25000 km of rivers should be restored into free-flowing rivers by 2030 through the removal of primarily obsolete barriers and the restoration of floodplains and wetlands. This document proposes criteria for identifying free-flowing rivers, taking into account longitudinal, lateral, and vertical connectivity at local and catchment scales. The aim is to provide a tool that can be used by authorities to determine the length of free-flowing rivers in their catchments.

European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Tokarski, M., Vecchione, E., et al., Publications Office of the European Union, 2024.

Working in the context of the EU Pollinators Initiative, the Competence Centre on Participatory and Deliberative Democracy has been supporting the Directorate-General for Environment through the Science and Technology for Pollinating Insects (STING) project in exploring innovative approaches to engaging citizens in reversing the decline of wild pollinating insects. This report summarises the work of five experts contracted to pilot participatory processes bringing farmers and ordinary citizens together to extend the terms of the debate on pollinators decline and to co-create local interventions participatory processes and tools can be effective in increasing the engagement of different publics in addressing the decline of wild pollinating insects.

European Commission: European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency, Environmental intelligence – An enabling platform to help solve complex environmental challenges, Publications Office of the European Union, 2024.

Environmental intelligence (EI) provides the scientific and technological innovations needed to better manage and respond to climate change, resource depletion, pollution, risks to human and animal health, and biodiversity loss. The complexity of these challenges demands more than traditional scientific methods: it requires dynamic models capable of predicting and tracking environmental changes in real time, integrating diverse data sources, and fostering a systemic understanding of socio-environmental processes and interactions. Leveraging advanced sensor technologies, robots, artificial intelligence and interdisciplinary research, environmental intelligence aims to improve policy making, optimise resource management and provide the information needed to promote sustainable behaviours.

Katalin Tóth, Szvetlana Ács, Karin Aschberger, Giulia Barbero Vignola, Stephanie Bopp, et al., European Commission, Joint Research Centre, 2025.

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) the European Commission service providing evidence-based science and knowledge to support EU policies has set up its first monitoring framework to provide information on progress towards a fair, healthy and environmentally friendly food system, built on a set of environmental, economic and social (including health) indicators. More than 350 indicators on underpinning policies were screened and their suitability assessed for the intended objective. The selected indicators have been visualised in a monitoring dashboard, an information system and a communication tool created by the JRC. This report summarises the main steps taken to develop the system, the principles governing the selection of the indicators and plans for further work.

European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, Könnölä, T., Bakker, M., et al., Publications Office of the European Union, 2023.

The project focuses geographically on Europe and looks toward 2050, on regimes of stewardship of land and sea and address the role of ownership, access and use rights in rural areas (cities excluded), multiple uses of spaces (both land and sea), biodiversity, food (both aquaculture, fisheries, and agriculture), energy (use of renewables), raw materials (mining etc.), carbon removal and storage, adaptation to climate change. While the challenges are global, they are addressed especially from the European research and innovation policy perspective.

European Commission, Directorate-General for Environment, Publications Office of the European Union, 2023.

Under the European Green Deal, the EU’s Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 tackles the protection and restoration of nature by making a number of specific commitments and setting several targets. Biodiversity-friendly practices for enhancing the quantity and quality of EU forests are also being promoted. The Biodiversity Strategy announced, among other objectives, guidelines on biodiversity-friendly afforestation, reforestation and tree planting.

European Commission, Directorate-General for Environment, Publications Office of the European Union, 2023.

Under the European Green Deal, the EU biodiversity strategy for 2030 sets a path for the recovery of Europe’s biodiversity, including its forest biodiversity. The biodiversity strategy for 2030 highlights the importance of sustainably managing forests as a nature-based solution in the fight against climate change, and it calls for biodiversity-friendly forestry practices to continue and to be further developed. To this end, it asks the Commission to develop guidelines on closer-to-nature forest management.

European Commission, Directorate-General for Environment, Publications Office of the European Union, 2023.

This report brings together the findings of an Impact Assessment (IA) study for the European Commission (EC) Directorate-General for the Environment which supported the development of the proposal for an EU Nature Restoration Law. More specifically, this study assessed the impacts of introducing legally-binding nature restoration targets as proposed in the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030.

European Commission, Directorate-General for Environment, Publications Office of the European Union, 2023.

This report was prepared for the European Commission DG Environment by a consortium consisting of Trinomics (lead), IEEP, UNEP-WCMC and IUCN to the support study to the formal Impact Assessment (IA) for a legally-binding initiative for EU-wide nature restoration targets. As part of this study, 10 thematic sub-assessments were undertaken for broad ecosystem types and other natural capital features in scope of the IA.

European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, Jessop, A., Chow, C., et al., Publications Office of the European Union, 2023.

MarBioME (Marine Biodiversity Monitoring study in Europe) provides an extensive overview and appraisal of the status of Marine Biodiversity Monitoring in the European Union (EU) and adjacent waters (including actors, roles, infrastructures and methodologies). The review was conducted to support the implementation of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) and other relevant EU legislation on marine biodiversity and is of interest to a vast community of scientists and public authorities The publication falls under Studies and reports.

European Commission: Directorate-General for Environment and Fogleman, V., Polluter pays principle – Liability for environmental damage, Publications Office of the European Union, 2024.

The aim of this paper is to map out and analyse the way in which EU environmental law applies – and the degree to which it applies – the polluter pays principle (PPP) in article 191(2) Treaty on the functioning of the European Union (TFEU) through liability for environmental damage including liability for preventing and remediating pollution/contamination and other environmental damage, penalties for environmental damage offences, and civil liability claims for environmental damage. The paper also maps out and analyses EU legislation that forms the basis for water and biodiversity damage under the Environmental Liability Directive (ELD) and EU legislation that designates areas in which Member States should carry out remediation and/or restoration measures. Although the EU version of the PPP for liability for environmental damage does not apply directly to much of that legislation, Member State versions of the PPP may apply to national legislation that imposes liability for such remediation and/or restoration.

European Commission: Joint Research Centre, Ventocilla, J., Vasilakopoulos, P., Liquete, C., Gkimtsas, G. et al., Protocol for handling policy requests received by the EC’s Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity. Version 1, Publications Office of the European Union, 2024.

The Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity (KCBD) is a body of the European Commission (EC) and the European Environment Agency (EEA) created in 2020 mainly to support the implementation and mainstreaming of the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030 (BDS) and other international biodiversity commitments. The KCBD provides evidence and advice on biodiversity related topics when requested by policy-making. The KCBD secretariat is hosted by the Joint Research Centre (JRC). The KCBD secretariat has developed a ticketing system for policy requests; i.e., an online form to be used by the services of the EC to submit their requests for scientific support on biodiversity-related matters. The purpose of this protocol is to standardise the process to be followed once the KCBD receives a request through the ticketing system, and to guide both internal and external collaborators through the steps and considerations to be made.

European Commission: Joint Research Centre, Potts, S., Bartomeus, I., Biesmeijer, K., Breeze, T. et al., Refined proposal for an EU pollinator monitoring scheme, Publications Office of the European Union, 2024

This report presents refined options for an EU Pollinator Monitoring Scheme (EU PoMS), based on the work of a technical expert group comprising 26 international experts from 12 countries, with members being representatives of universities, research institutes and NGOs. The work presented here was produced during the second part of the STING project (Science and Technology for Pollinating Insects, running from 2022 to 2024). It provides updated methodological options for the standardised monitoring of wild pollinators (bees, hoverflies, butterflies and moths) for the core scheme of the EU PoMS, taking into consideration the data and knowledge generated by the SPRING (Strengthening Pollinator Recovery through Indicators and Monitoring) and other projects.

European Commission: Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, Restoring ecosystems under the Green Deal Call – Recovering biodiversity and connecting to nature, Publications Office of the European Union, 2024.

Large-scale ecosystem restoration is an urgent necessity in Europe to achieve the goal of recovering nature to a biodiverse and resilient state, whilst simultaneously mitigating against climate change. This report examines the current condition of European ecosystems and the landscape of European biodiversity and ecosystem restoration policy, with a particular focus on the groundbreaking, recently adopted Nature Restoration Law. Work is underway to upscale ecosystem restoration in Europe through the Horizon 2020 Green Deal Call. Four projects (MERLIN, REST-COAST, SUPERB, and WaterLANDS) have been granted funding to develop and demonstrate methodologies for large-scale ecosystem restoration in terrestrial, freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems. Their work is essential for a transformative change towards a sustainable, resilient, and just future for Europe.

European Commission: Directorate-General for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union, Cziesielski, M., Dekker-Hufler, C., Pal, T., Nicholls, G. et al., Study for a methodological framework and assessment of potential financial risks associated with biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation – Final report, Publications Office of the European Union, 2024.

One of the key pillars of the European Green Deal (EGD) is set on prioritizing the preservation and enhancement of natural capital. Amidst key legislations and international commitments, the EU Sustainable Finance agenda mandates transparency, urging financial institutions to align with nature-positive strategies. Biodiversity and nature loss pose multifaceted risks, extending beyond the environmental realm, impacting essential economic activities and the overall financial system. Recognizing these risks, both public and private sectors are increasingly integrating nature and biodiversity into long-term strategies and risk assessments. This study aims to enhance the European financial sector's preparedness by providing a flexible methodological framework, drawing on existing climate and nature risk approaches.