The results of the project will be produced in six different work packages. Here is an overview of the different work streams.

The overall objective of Work Package 1 is to coordinate and manage the implementation and progress of the project. Work package 1 tasks will:

• Ensure and monitor that the project achieves its planned objectives, meets its milestones, and produces high-quality deliverables on time.
• Establish effective internal communication measures (including an interactive project portal as a project workspace), increase mutual understanding, and foster integration between partners and work packages.
• Ensure that the contractual obligations of the consortium are met. Advise and guide partners to comply with the terms and conditions of the European Union Grant Agreement and the “BIO-CAPITAL” Consortium Agreement.
• Ensure that resources are managed, controlled, and funds distributed under the Grant Agreement and the Consortium Agreement.

Tasks:

1.1. Project implementation and internal communication
1.2. Use case facilitation
1.3. Progress and performance measurement, evaluation and risk assessment
1.4. Administrative, contractual and financial management
1.5. Data management and intellectual property rights
1.6. Reporting to the European Commission

This work package examines the opportunities, challenges, barriers, and enablers in the current policy, financing and investment landscape for tackling biodiversity loss and enhancing biodiversity. It identifies existing investment instruments and, where necessary, how they can be refocused through promotion, awareness raising, communication, and highlighting of best practice. It will then identify alternative funding mechanisms and project pipelines that can address biodiversity loss. In general, the work package provides the theoretical basis for the development and implementation of biodiversity-friendly financial solutions to mobilise the investment community.

Tasks:

2.1. Mapping policy and legal framework for biodiversity protection and restoration investments
2.2. Identifying current biodiversity-related financial mechanisms and determining the barriers and enablers for their implementation
2.3. Taking advantage of opportunities for improvement from a market perspective
2.4. Informing the development of innovative and scalable financing mechanisms

The objective of this work package is to translate the European Union policy objectives into observable parameters (spatio-temporal observable parameters), to define the necessary technical requirements to adapt these observable parameters at the use case level, and finally to test the remote sensing approach to support the assessment and monitoring of biodiversity gains. In particular, work package 3 will:

• Determine which component of each ecosystem is important with regard to (i) biodiversity capital and (ii) financial and economic barriers/enablers highlighted in work package 2. At the same time, this task will focus on determining the agro-environmental characteristics (ecological regions, agro-climatic regions, land cover, etc.) of the use case area (corresponding to the pilot site).
• Understand the spatiotemporal characteristics and study them together with the temporal, spectral, and spatial capabilities of Earth observation and apply them to all use cases
• Develop observable parameters for biodiversity enhancement, particularly assessing habitat change (loss and gain) and status evolution (healthy and unhealthy).
• Provide recommendations on reproducibility, scalability and reusability to work package partners and further dissemination.

Tasks:

3.1. Integrating work package 2 results in use cases and setting up the work package 3 tasks
3.2. Matching the spatiotemporal observable parameters derived by task 3.1 thanks to earth observation data and remote sensing methods
3.3. Improvement of remote sensing-observable parameters created in 3.2 through diachronic analysis

Work package 4 will co-design, develop, and implement innovative financial solutions that support and incentivise the transition of land use and management practices that will protect, restore, and sustainably use biodiversity across various managed ecosystems. Work package 4 aims to:

Develop compelling business cases: by highlighting the urgency and structure of investment opportunities for biodiversity conservation, restoration, and sustainable use, focusing on agro-ecological practices, regenerative agriculture and nature-based solutions for pollinators at the landscape level and sustainable alpine forest management practices.

• Design and implement innovative financing mechanisms: by establishing locally tailored Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) frameworks, integrating Triple Capital Accounting (TCA), exploring index insurance options, and assessing the potential of green and sustainability bonds to support business cases and address the specific needs and challenges of different use cases.
• Fostering stakeholder engagement: by actively involving stakeholders from different sectors, promoting cross-sectoral collaboration, and advancing the development of policy frameworks that integrate biodiversity considerations into decision-making processes.

In order to achieve these three objectives, work package 4 aims to stimulate the mobilisation of financial resources, in particular from the private sector, for the conservation, restoration and sustainable use of biodiversity. Work package 4 will work in synergy with work package 5 to facilitate the development of biodiversity certificates to stimulate investment in biodiversity enhancement.

Tasks:

4.1. Develop economic foundations and business cases for sustainable financing
4.2. Local-tailoring payments for ecosystem services
4.3. Integrate Triple Capital Accounting and Biodiversity Performance with PES Framework
4.4. Co-design, develop and test multiple insurance products

The overall objective of the work package is to scale up and harmonise the results of the use cases in light of biodiversity certification. In particular, work package WP5 is designed to:

• Create clusters from ecosystems with similar biodiversity objectives at the European level in order to stratify the biodiversity certification methodology.
• Harmonise the methodological innovations benchmarked in work package 3 and work package 4 on the different use cases to describe the main clusters and provide guidelines for the clusters represented by each use case.
• Develop quantitative parameters to measure the potential biodiversity uplift. These parameters need to be i) linked to the biodiversity status of of each ecosystem cluster and ii) to the local importance of the site for the structural connectivity of its neighbourhood.
• Co-create certificates with all stakeholders based on a unified framework, in synergy with work package 4.
• Design a market for biodiversity certificates.

In order to achieve these objectives, as a baseline for the actual biodiversity certification process, we will collect information on the extent of ecosystems and the monitoring of biodiversity of species using remote sensing and geographic information systems. This information will be cross-referenced with reported activities to determine the net impact on biodiversity in different areas and help identify areas where biodiversity restoration would be most effective. Stakeholder engagement methods will be used to understand the requirements and expectations of key stakeholders in order to ensure trust, reliability and validity in and of biodiversity certificates. Different types of biodiversity certificates will be issued depending on the scope of actions implemented and the baselines for setting up a market will be outlined.

Tasks:

5.1. Clustering ecosystems of similar biodiversity potential
5.2. Quantifying potential biodiversity uplift
5.3. Biodiversity certificate implementation for each use case
5.4. Engaging stakeholders to endorse biodiversity certificates
5.5. Towards a biodiversity certificate market

The objective of work package 6 is to ensure the most efficient exploitation of the project results and to achieve the highest possible benefits for the scientific community, the financial industry, and the European society, with the ultimate aim of developing innovative financial solutions tailored to the specific needs of individual use cases across Europe. In doing so, it will

• Facilitate networking and mutual communication with the scientific community, the private finance community (banking/insurance/private equity and debt markets) and the general public.
• Manage and exploit the processes for capturing and protecting intellectual property, including innovative biodiversity research or diagnostic tools together with sustainable financing solutions.

Tasks:

6.1. Setting up communication infrastructure
6.2. Ongoing communication work and internal communication capacity building
6.3. Exploitation
6.4. Collaboration with existing knowledge