From Nature Restoration to Territorial Resilience and Investment

Biodiversity Factory is seeking partners for Horizon Europe Nature proposals interested in moving from the measurement of individual biodiversity and ecosystem-service outcomes towards an assessment of ecosystem functionality, resilience and durability.

Our starting hypothesis is that restoration performance should not be assessed only through first-level indicators such as biodiversity, carbon, soil or water condition. These outcomes could be complemented by “second-level indicators” describing how the system functions: structural complexity, connectivity, stability under disturbance, resilience and capacity for self-organisation.

We are particularly interested in collaboratively testing two related concepts.

The first is an Ecosystem Autonomy Gradient: a framework for assessing the transition from ecosystems highly dependent on continued external intervention towards systems increasingly capable of maintaining and regenerating key ecological functions.

The second is the idea of a minimum functional configuration: whether combinations of scale, structure, connectivity and ecological interactions can be identified beyond which restored or managed ecosystems become more functionally resilient under disturbance.

The purpose is not only ecological assessment. We want to explore how these properties can improve territorial decision-making: identifying where restoration investment is most needed, comparing intervention portfolios, defining meaningful MRV frameworks, assessing contributions to physical-risk reduction, identifying economic beneficiaries and supporting governance and investment decisions.

We are therefore looking for complementary partners able to test, challenge and operationalise these hypotheses: universities and ecological research organisations; Living Labs and demonstration territories; Earth Observation, biodiversity monitoring and modelling specialists; public authorities and regions; land managers and implementation partners; and organisations working on economics, finance and natural-capital valuation.

Biodiversity Factory can contribute environmental and sustainability expertise, LCA and impact assessment, indicator and MRV architecture, stakeholder and governance design, EU project design, exploitation and replication strategies, and the development of business and investment cases.

We are particularly interested in cooperation under HORIZON-NATURE-2027-02-02 (restoration Living Labs), HORIZON-NATURE-2027-01-03 (systemic transformative change), HORIZON-NATURE-2027-02-05 (biodiversity monitoring) and HORIZON-NATURE-2027-02-03 (scaling and networking of Living Labs).