CL6-2026-01-BIODIV-01: Understanding and tackling the decline of insects

While scientific understanding of insect decline is needed and is slowly advancing, ever-greater descriptive knowledge alone will not reverse the trend. What remains underdeveloped in many proposals—particularly those led by academic institutions—is a focus on tackling the drivers of decline. Some pressures, such as large-scale climatic shifts, are difficult to mitigate directly or within short time frames. However, the dominant and most immediately "actionable" driver in the EU is land use, especially land use governed by private-sector actors (agroforestry, energy and extractive sectors to name a few). These actors are too often engaged late in the process, approached as obstacles to be managed once scientific evidence has accumulated to demonstrate the harms of their operations. Yet this is not how businesses work, nor is it how transformative change occurs. The evolution of the climate-change discourse provides a clear parallel: a decade ago, most companies did not recognise climate risks as material; today, they internalise them within business strategic planning. Biodiversity is now undergoing a similar convergence of ecological urgency and business relevance. For businesses, biodiversity is no longer a distant or reputational issue but a systemic threat to private-sector operations, resilience, and long-term value creation. Because the private sector is simultaneously the principal driver of biodiversity loss and the actor most exposed to its consequences, integrating this converging understanding into research on the specific mechanisms and pathways of insect decline will be essential.

Biodiversity and Sustainability Solutions (BaSS), founded at the interface between academia and practice, was established precisely to work with private-sector actors to help them understand, manage, and improve their biodiversity impacts. We therefore propose to lead the exchange, knowledge brokerage, and facilitation between scientific partners and land-use decision-makers. Embedding this cross-sector convergence into the project’s design and implementation will significantly enhance the capacity of Horizon Europe investments not only to understand but to tackle insect decline across EU landscapes.