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You are here: Home / Call for Proposals and Call for Applications / European Commission seeks Proposals to scale up Biodiversity & Ecosystem

European Commission seeks Proposals to scale up Biodiversity & Ecosystem

Deadline: 26-Jan-21

The European Commission is inviting proposals to scale up Restoring Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, so that opportunities for substantial biodiversity and ecosystem services gains will be realised, which in turn deliver social and economic benefits.

Projects are expected to give priority in their budgets for hands-on action on restoration. In order to ensure a balanced portfolio of supported actions, at least two proposals covering terrestrial and/or freshwater ecosystems, and at least two covering coastal and/or marine ecosystems will be funded.

Actions should

  • provide large-scale demonstrators of how systemic upscaling and replication of best practice ecosystem restoration can be deployed at regional, national and cross-border levels, focusing on degraded terrestrial, freshwater, coastal or marine ecosystems, responding to relevant restoration goals enhancing biodiversity;
  • in line with the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, restore degraded ecosystems, in particular those with high potential to capture and store carbon and to prevent and reduce the impact of natural disasters, and, where relevant, to contribute to the achievement of favourable status for species and habitats of the Birds and Habitats Directives inside and outside the Natura 2000 network of protected areas;
  • adapt, integrate and demonstrate innovative methods (technological, non-technological, social and governance, including sustainable financing) on upscaling ecosystem restoration, also in regions and for communities in transition;
  • support the development of specific demand and supply chains in restoring ecosystems on land or at sea – recognising that conditions at sea can considerably differ from the ones on land (including freshwater), that speed of change and disturbance might differ, and that solutions to reverse biodiversity decline are context-specific;
  • demonstrate and test how restoration activities and socio-ecological management of ecosystems enable sustainable, climate-neutral and climate-resilient, inclusive, transformative approaches, including across the bio-economy (agriculture, forestry, marine and innovative bio-based sectors) and as investments in disaster risk reduction;
  • promote scaling up and stepping up of implementation of nature-based solutions building on existing experience in particular on lessons learned and best practices gained through EU-funded projects and initiatives such as those supported by Horizon 2020 and the LIFE programme in order to address barriers to implementation for systemic nature-based solutions focussing on restoration in urban, peri-urban, rural or marine areas;
  • showcase how restoring ecosystems at large scale will also help human communities to adapt to changing conditions at their local level, and how restoration activities can be integrated into economically and socially viable land use practices, enabling a shift of social and behavioural patterns towards increased benefits for biodiversity and strengthening social acceptance and social resilience;
  • demonstrate how to maximise synergies and avoid trade-offs between priorities for restoring biodiversity, mitigating and adapting to climate change (such as those identified jointly by the IPCC and IPBES).
  • generate knowledge on how large-scale restoration can accelerate transformative change beneficial for biodiversity and climate resilience, and bring this information to UN programmes, as well as to IPCC and IPBES, processes.

Funding Information

  • The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of between EUR 16 and 25 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Actions should also address all of the following issues

  • Together with the concerned communities, developing a scalability plan, including at landscape scale and using spatial planning legislation where relevant. The scalability plan should include diffusion of innovative solutions, and a process for commitments in adopting large-scale restoration within governance and financing systems, so other relevant communities can replicate the upscaling across the EU and internationally. It should seek guarantees for the non-reversibility and/or continuity of up-scaled restoration activities and/or further replication and/or expansion, implementation of sustainable management practices and monitoring after the end of the projects.
  • Setting baselines, goals and a monitoring framework for the projects: why an activity is being undertaken, what changes are expected and by when, and how changes are monitored in order to determine if the action was successful in relation to the original goals. Activities should be prioritized according to their urgency for addressing upscaling restoration challenges, the restoration potential of degraded ecosystems, the significance of research for supporting EU policy needs, their contribution to the international biodiversity agenda, and their potential to trigger transformative change.
  • Restoration actions should be paired with supportive and robust management practices that reduce pressures and direct habitat damage at the local scale, and empower civil society in planning and deployment of restoration and maintenance of its achievements to support restoration efforts in the long term.
  • Prioritisation should be informed by social, economic and ecological conditions and recovery efficiency to ensure restoration efforts are resilient and efficient. Approaches should be based on existing knowledge from prior research or experience and tested restoration methods and should seek complementarity with LIFE projects [14]. To increase the scale, scope and pace of restoration, efforts should be based on evidence, better understanding and communication of ecosystem service recovery and thresholds for effective ecosystem restoration, and the inclusive involvement of social and economic actors.
  • Activities related to improving ecosystem condition should be integrated into best practice monitoring activities within respective monitoring governance schemes. No new restoration monitoring approaches should be developed. Actions should explicitly include deliverables which apply (or test, if necessary) monitoring schemes with efficiency and output indicators related to restoration, its benefits and trade-offs.
  • Actions should promote innovative funding, cross-sectoral collaborations and social participation to support the design, implementation and monitoring of sustainable and effective restoration efforts. They should explore how upscaling and mainstreaming of ecosystem restoration could facilitate systemic transformation in governance, policy making, financing, public procurement, economic development, social innovation, infrastructure and regional strategic planning.
  • In line with the strategy for EU international cooperation in research and innovation (COM(2012)497), international cooperation is encouraged for adapting the upscaling approaches for restoration demonstrated for use in European conditions[16] and applying them to harness transformative change internationally.

Expected Impact

The project results are expected to contribute to:

  • maintained and enhanced natural carbon sinks and reduced greenhouse gas emissions through the important role of biodiversity, local reversal of the degradation of ecosystems, recovery of ecosystem functions, increased connectivity and resilience of ecosystems, and improved delivery of a range of ecosystem services;
  • the objectives of the European Green Deal, including the EU commitment to reduce emission by 50-55% by 2030 and become net carbon-neutral by 2050; the implementation of the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 and the EU Nature Directives, the Water and Marine Strategy Framework Directives, the Farm-to-Fork Strategy, the Pollinators Initiative, the Climate Law, the Bioeconomy Strategy and Action Plan, EU Urban Policies, and the revised EU Adaptation Strategy; supporting the EU Covenant of Mayors, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015-2030), the UN Decade of Restoration including land/sea degradation neutrality, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals;
  • widespread and innovative scaling-up of ecosystem restoration to maintain and enhance natural carbon sinks and other ecosystem services, with a view to significantly reducing the carbon and environmental footprint of Europe;
  • increased restoration through uptake of public-private partnerships and (voluntary) market-based incentives for business and individuals within restoration initiatives, including as the result of trans-disciplinary research and stakeholder engagement to help identify co-funding for long-term maintenance and buy-in from the private sector;
  • enhanced empowerment, engagement and reconnection of local communities with nature and increased social awareness on restoration actions, and their benefits;
  • transformational change supporting a just transition based on investing in nature together with vulnerable regions and communities improving their resilience of in the face of rapid changes in climate and environment, economies and social conditions.

Eligibility Criteria

  • A number of non-EU/non-Associated Countries that are not automatically eligible for funding have made specific provisions for making funding available for their participants in Horizon 2020 projects.
  • To be considered admissible, a proposal/application must be:
    • submitted in the electronic submission system before the deadline given in the call conditions or rules of contest;
    • readable, accessible and printable;
    • complete and include the requested administrative data, the proposal description, and any obligatory supporting documents specified in the call/contest;
    • include a draft plan for the exploitation and dissemination of the results, unless otherwise specified in the call conditions. The draft plan is not required for proposals at the first stage of two-stage procedures.

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