Biodiversity Factory is an emerging initiative exploring how ecosystem restoration and natural capital can become investable forms of resilient territorial infrastructure.
Its core focus is the connection between ecological condition, ecosystem functionality, physical-risk resilience and economic decision-making. Rather than considering biodiversity and ecosystem-service metrics as endpoints, Biodiversity Factory aims to translate ecological evidence into decisions about where, how and why to invest in regeneration.
A distinctive area of development concerns “second-level indicators”: indicators designed to complement conventional biodiversity, soil, water and carbon metrics by assessing properties such as structural complexity, connectivity, stability, resilience to disturbance and capacity for self-organisation. This includes exploring an Ecosystem Autonomy Gradient, from systems highly dependent on continued external intervention towards systems increasingly capable of maintaining and regenerating key ecological functions.
A related research question concerns the minimum functional configuration — in terms of scale, structure, connectivity and ecological interactions — required for restored or managed ecosystems to maintain key functions under disturbance. Understanding these thresholds could help move restoration assessment from measuring individual outcomes towards evaluating functional resilience and durability.
Biodiversity Factory seeks to connect this ecological layer with territorial decision architecture: identifying dependencies and physical risks, prioritising regenerative interventions, defining measurable outcomes and MRV frameworks, identifying economic beneficiaries, and developing governance, financing and investment models capable of supporting implementation at scale.
The initiative is currently being developed as a collaborative platform at the interface of environmental science, territorial governance and investment. It is particularly interested in cooperation with universities and research organisations, public authorities and regions, Living Labs, Earth Observation and monitoring specialists, land managers, businesses and financial actors.
Within Horizon Europe, Biodiversity Factory aims to contribute to projects on ecosystem restoration and resilience, systemic transformative change, biodiversity monitoring and decision support, and the replication and scaling of nature restoration solutions.