Assessing and modelling socio-economic impacts of nature restoration

Expected Outcome:

Successful proposals will contribute to the impacts of this destination by providing tools to assess the socio-economic impacts, including benefits and costs, of measures aiming at restoring degraded ecosystems ensuring the provision of ecosystem services, including for adaptation and/or mitigation to climate change.

Project results are expected to contribute to all the following expected outcomes:

• short, medium, and long-term socio-economic impacts, including benefits and costs, of nature restoration, along with their social and territorial distribution, are better known including by scientists and stakeholders of the public and private sectors;
• policy-makers have at their disposal science-based tools to predict impacts, including benefits and costs, of the implementation of policies aiming at restoring nature;
• stakeholders in charge of financing or implementing nature restoration have tools at their disposal to integrate impacts, including benefits and costs, of nature restoration in their business plans;
• socio-economic benefits and costs are traceable directly to the intervention or the origin of stressor, for instance reduction of pollution input.

Scope:

The EU biodiversity strategy for 2030 set the following targets for 2030: significant areas of degraded and carbon-rich ecosystems are restored; habitats and species show no deterioration in conservation trend and status, and at least 30% reach favourable conservation status or at least show a positive trend. The EU Nature Restoration Regulation sets binding targets for 2030 and 2050, with an incremental implementation. The European Climate Law requires that policies on adaptation in the Union and in Member States are coherent, mutually supportive, provide co-benefits for sectoral policies, and work towards better integration of adaptation to climate change in a consistent manner in all policy areas, including relevant socioeconomic and environmental policies and actions.

R&I activities are expected to:

• conduct sector-specific assessments to measure the comprehensive economic and social (including employment) impacts and benefits of nature restoration, including their territorial and social distribution, encompassing both the financial effect of economic activities and the non-market benefits (including climate mitigation and adaptation, health and well-being benefits) derived from ecosystem services including provisioning, regulating and cultural services as well as nature's contribution to people;
• employ a multidisciplinary approach combining at least expertise in economics, ecology, social sciences, geography, sustainability and environmental science as well as system and complexity science to capture the full range of impacts and benefits;
• develop and validate modelling approaches, that can build on existing environmental and socio-economic models, to analyse the economic, social and employment impacts and benefits of nature restoration, including their territorial and social distribution, integrating also biodiversity, ecosystem services and nature’s contribution to people good quality of life including food security;
• enable understanding of the incremental progress in nature restoration between the 2030 and 2050 target years to guide public and private stakeholders in their continued actions through quantification of socio-economic benefits and impacts of individual measures;
• improve the understanding of the possibilities and limitations of tools for socio-economic assessments of nature restoration, particularly with regard to the non-market benefits.

Proposals should build on results of past and on-going projects and on the knowledge compiled in the assessment reports produced by the Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), including the IPBES values assessment and the IPBES scenarios and models assessment.

This topic requires the effective contribution of SSH disciplines, including economics, socio-economics, geography and sociology. It is essential to involve SSH experts and institutions, as well as incorporate relevant gender expertise, in order to produce meaningful and significant effects enhancing the societal impact of the related research activities.

Concrete efforts should be made to ensure that the data produced in the context of the funded projects is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable), particularly in the context of real-time data feeds, exploring workflows that can provide “FAIR-by-design” data, i.e., data that is FAIR from its generation.

Proposals should envisage enough resources to collaborate with other selected projects under this topic to provide an effective integration of the models generated. Projects will be asked to cooperate with projects that will be selected under the following topics under this call: HORIZON-CL6-2025-01-BIODIV-05: Assessing and modelling ecosystems’ dynamic processes to guide restoration activities and to improve models used for climate and HORIZON-CL6-2025-01-BIODIV-10: Supporting the implementation of nature restoration measures for sustainable farming systems.

Proposals should foresee cooperation with the EC Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity and the Science Service project BioAgora.