Financing Nature, Restoring Balance: How BIO-CAPITAL and RESTOREID Are Connecting Biodiversity, Economy, and Health

BIO-CAPITAL is not the only Horizon Europe project exploring the links between biodiversity and society. While BIO-CAPITAL develops innovative financing models for biodiversity conservation, RESTOREID focuses on the link between ecosystem restoration and disease prevention.

In this interview, Diego Ibáñez, Communication Manager of the RESTOREID project, and Hynek Roubík, coordinator of BIO-CAPITAL, talk about the synergies between their projects, their common goals and how stakeholder involvement is crucial to the success of the projects.

Diego Ibáñez: To start off, I just wanted to ask you if you could please introduce yourself.

Hynek Roubík: My name is Hynek Roubik. I work at the Faculty of Tropical Agricultural-Science of the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, where I am currently serving as Vice Dean for Science Research and Doctoral Studies. In two months, I’m starting as a Dean of the faculty here. I’m also Director of the Bioresources and Technology Divisions.

It’s a research division focused on various aspects related with environment, environmental engineering, environmental sciences. My background is relatively wide, but also very specific within environmental and resource management, which is good, because our BIO-CAPITAL project also puts together a lot of different issues, expertise and stakeholders.

Diego Ibáñez: You brought up BIO-CAPITAL, which is why we’re here today. Could you please provide a quick introduction to the project? What’s the mission, the objectives?

Hynek Roubík: BIO-CAPITAL is a Horizon Europe project, which is putting together 17 partners. It’s quite a collaborative initiative, is aiming at integrating the biodiversity protection sector with financial indicators and satellite based Earth observation data.

Our aim is to find the ideal mechanisms for sustainable business models, which serve biodiversity monitoring and conservation, as well as financial advantages for the private sector. For us, it’s important to bring it biodiversity and finance together in a common understanding. In doing so, we have to take baby steps.

Now, we are at the level of preparing the baseline studies for understanding the situation and putting it all in form of some outputs, which can be useful for everyone. We are working on use case scenarios in different locations in Europe.

Diego Ibáñez: I think that’s definitely going to be a very interesting field of exploration. It very well links with the RESTOREID project I am representing. It’s also a Horizon project, and the focus is also on biodiversity, especially on restoration and on better understanding of the links between biodiversity, restoration and disease emergence. We also have a central focus on socio-economical aspect, but more on the part of civil society and especially policymaking. Let’s look at the complementarity between both projects. How do our projects complement each other, and do you see synergies?

Hynek Roubík: When I read about the RESTOREID project, I thought it’s very clear that we have a common goal of biodiversity conservation and ecosystem restoration at the core, but of course the approaches are different, which makes sense because it has to be tackled from different angles.

Where the main synergies should lie is in sharing the analyses that we do, because it’s important not to do something over and over again, but to always build on something. Then, where I see a need for synergy, is the work with stakeholders and external actors, because. Joint efforts here are quite necessary, because we have to work with stakeholders effectively.

I think a big advantage can also be that some of the use cases in BIO-CAPITAL and RESTOREID are in very similar ecosystems. For example, I saw that you are focusing on wetlands, which we are doing too. The same goes for forest areas. I think here we can complement each other, because in our case we have the alpine forest, and you have the northern forest of Scandinavia.

Diego Ibáñez: I agree, especially with two things you mentioned: Avoiding the duplication of efforts, data and resources. And also with what you said about stakeholder engagement. It’s very much needed, but a challenge as well.

Our projects rely on stakeholders who are committed, and who can give a lot of feedback and input. It can be difficult to get them on board sometimes. In our project, we are developing a Knowledge Exchange Platform (KEP), which we hope will address this issue that many projects face. We’re trying to think it from a user’s perspective, so it will serve as a platform to not only exchange data, but knowledge, information, and network. Hopefully, this will be a boost to strengthen collaboration between projects, and create a bridge between stakeholders and projects. That’s what we’re working on right now.

Hynek Roubík: That does sound promising.

Diego Ibáñez: The BIO-CAPITAL project, started in June 2024, six months after RESTOREID. Are there already any findings, insights, achievements, milestones that you can share?

Hynek Roubík: I think that one very important achievement for us at this early stage is a report on the policy and financial framework for biodiversity protection investments. It’s a very comprehensive work, and a very important baseline for all the further work. It’s a detailed overview of some 150 pages – but it’s also very easy to read, I believe. It provides a very good overview of the current status of different regulatory frameworks on biodiversity, the different strategies which are out there, like the EU Green Deal, the Biodiversity Strategy 2030, the different Farm-to-Fork approaches, and so on, but also national policy regulations, directives and guidelines.

For our work, it was crucial to summarize all this, and make a comprehensive framework out of that, in order to understand the European sustainable financing framework and the regulation that influences it. The result is quite robust, allowing us to delve into the work with practical examples on use cases level in different regions. We can now very clearly say how our work fits not only in the EU policy framework, but also into the national regulations, which cannot be omitted when we want the models to really work in the end.

There’s also a chapter identifying the inconsistencies, barriers and challenges in the regulatory framework. That also gives you also an interesting perspective.

Diego Ibáñez: That’s definitely something very important for everyone working in this field. We have touched a bit on different types of stakeholders. We’ve mentioned policy and regulation, we’ve mentioned academia, of course. However, my impression is, that one particular group of stakeholders is a bit taken for granted, perhaps. That is the wider public, the general people. So I also wanted to ask if you have any concrete examples on how BIO-CAPITAL is going to benefit the wider public.

Hynek Roubík: Well, we work on the assumption that protecting and restoring biodiversity is already important to the public. Ultimately, I believe that the sustainable financing model for biodiversity conversation and restoration that we’re developing will benefit the general public. It will allow capital investment in biodiversity, and it will monitor biodiversity from space using Earth observation technology. This will help create transparency and accountability. This affects a very broad range of public stakeholders if it works.

Diego Ibáñez: Looking ahead, what developments or results can we expect from BIO-CAPITAL? What will happen in the in the following months? Are you looking forward to particular results of the project?

Hynek Roubík: One milestone we’re looking forward to, right now, is our project meeting here in Prague, later this months. That’s always very exciting. The discussions will hopefully motivate us and turn us into working bees.

Diego Ibáñez: I hope you have a good meeting! What is the one sentence, the one key message, that readers should remember from this interview about BIO-CAPITAL?

Hynek Roubík: In one sentence, I would say it’s important to keep in mind that biodiversity is not just an environmental concern, but it’s also an economic opportunity. And through collaboration with different stakeholders, policy, industry and research, BIO-CAPITAL is trying to find a way for more sustainable financial models that can benefit both nature and society.

Diego Ibáñez: That’s a nice closing statement. Thank you, Hynek!