Policy Brief | Driving Transformative Change for a Just and Sustainable Europe: Insights from Transdisciplinary Nexus Research
Introduction
Human well-being is dependent on the functioning of natural systems. Yet, the underlying causes of biodiversity loss remain deeply embedded in our current economic goals, sociocultural values, and institutional structures. Conservation efforts have often focused primarily on addressing the direct symptoms of biodiversity loss rather than the indirect anthropogenic drivers or “root causes”. Addressing these systemic drivers requires approaches that move beyond sectoral boundaries and fragmented decision-making. A nexus approach provides such a framework by considering the interconnections between sectors and policy objectives, helping policymakers to identify and leverage synergies (win-win solutions) and make trade-offs more transparent and manageable – for example, how dietary shifts can improve human health while reducing pressure on water resources, climate and nature.
Grounded in knowledge triangulation, the BIONEXT Guidance to Facilitate Transformative Change in Europe brings together evidence and insights from across the project within a structured framework, translating them into policy options and strategic entry points to support systemic change towards a nature-positive and sustainable future. The Guidance draws on:
Analysis of current and future interlinkages across the biodiversity-food-water-health-climate-energy-transport nexus (the biodiversity nexus) and their drivers;
Understanding of transformative change across ecological, technological and socio-economic systems, and insights on justice;
Real-world cases with transformative potential;
Analysis of 75 EU policy instruments;
Assessment of interventions in driving transformative change for biodiversity; and
Three co-created transition pathways for nature-positive futures.
BIONEXT demonstrates that transformative change is not simply a top-down process, but a multi-dimensional orientation that requires balancing synergies, trade-offs, and justice. By grounding these transitions in bottom-up grassroots initiatives and experiences of nature-positive stewards, BIONEXT highlights pathways through which European governance can move beyond incremental approaches towards more systemic and integrated forms of change. The Guidance serves as a policyoriented resource for decision-makers, offering an operational translation of transformative change principles tailored to the EU’s institutional context. This approach ensures that the proposed policy options are not only scientifically robust but also politically feasible, attuned to diverse societal values, and responsive to new knowledge.
Evidence and Analysis
Benefits of a Nexus and Transformative Approach
A nexus-based transformative approach can help halt biodiversity loss by treating biodiversity as a foundational priority rather than an isolated environmental endpoint. It can also support “exnovation” – the active phase-out of unsustainable practices and harmful subsidies that drive ecological exploitation – while scaling up green alternatives. Considering biodiversity alongside other nexus elements can improve policy coherence, reduce negative cascading impacts and support practices that foster reciprocal relationships between communities and their environments. A transformative approach also embeds social and ecological justice in governance, ensuring that the costs and benefits of transformation are distributed fairly, that power asymmetries are addressed, and that marginalised actors, such as nature-positive stewards who practise regenerative agriculture or community-led conservation, are recognised and supported.
Needs and Gaps in the European Policy Landscape
Despite a robust environmental framework, European policies often fall short of enabling transformative change due to several systemic shortcomings. Key gaps, identified through scientific evidence, stakeholder consultations and the analysis of 75 EU policy instruments, include:
Persistent sectoral silos in policy design and implementation. Environmental goals often remain secondary to the objectives of resource-intensive sectors such as agriculture and energy, leading to policy incoherence and incentives that directly undermine biodiversity.
An implementation and enforcement gap between EU-level commitments and local execution, driven by shortages in institutional capacity, administrative expertise, and resources within public administrations.
Insufficient integration of biodiversity into core economic and development policies.
Largely separate approaches to address biodiversity loss and climate change despite their strong interdependence.
Continued focus on direct symptoms (e.g., pollution) rather than the underlying indirect drivers of biodiversity loss, including the dominant economic growth paradigm and unsustainable consumption patterns.
Limited integration of nexus interlinkages into enforceable provisions of EU legislation.
Further barriers include limited meaningful stakeholder engagement and participation, a lag in applying available scientific nexus evidence to decision-making, and models that continue to treat sectors independently. Policies also remain dominated by an instrumental framing of nature, where nature is viewed purely as a resource for human use, often marginalising the intrinsic and relational values necessary for long-term stewardship
Making Cross-Sectoral Synergies and Trade-offs Visible
Understanding interactions across sectors is essential for designing policy mixes that maximise positive impacts while avoiding unintended consequences for nature. For example, agroecological and resource-efficient farming practices can create synergies between biodiversity conservation and food security. Conversely, a large-scale expansion of strictly protected areas may constrain local food production, and, if consumption patterns remain unchanged, shift environmental pressures to other regions. Similarly, while the rapid deployment of land-based renewable energy is essential for climate mitigation, it can contribute to habitat fragmentation and biodiversity loss. However, approaches such as agrivoltaics demonstrate how synergies can be achieved by combining renewable energy generation with agricultural production, improving land-use efficiency and reducing evapotranspiration in water-stressed regions. Making such synergies and trade-offs more visible through integrative spatial planning and nexus modelling allows for no-regret efficiency measures and coordinated land use that avoids conflicts.
Policy Implications and Options
Emerging from the evidence and insights brought together for the BIONEXT Guidance, strategic policy options for EU policymakers to drive transformative change include:
Prioritise cross-sectoral policy options for biodiversity: Promote and scale up innovative approaches that deliver benefits across multiple sectors through targeted investment, pilots and living labs. This can include adopting a One Health approach, further and fundamentally reforming the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), and promoting multifunctional land-uses.
Move nexus integration beyond policy preambles: Embed biodiversity and sectoral interlinkages in the operative provisions of binding EU legislation, supported by clear obligations, measurable targets, implementation mechanisms and reporting requirements.
Strength existing entry points for transformative change in the EU policy cycle: Enhance existing policy processes, governance mechanisms, funding instruments, participatory structures, and knowledge systems that can support transformative change, including impact assessments, strategic foresight, science-policy-practice interfaces, adaptive learning and experimentation, multi-level governance and capacity-building.
Embrace meaningful and influential participatory governance: Address power imbalances and ensure that diverse actors can genuinely influence decisions through deliberative processes that allow competing visions and interests to be openly negotiated and revisited. Remove administrative, financial and institutional barriers for grassroots stewardship actors, and formally recognise Indigenous and Local Knowledge throughout the policy cycle.
Internalise externalities and strengthen safeguards against environmental exploitation: Phase out environmentally harmful subsidies and introduce measures to ensure product prices reflect the true environmental and social costs of production and consumption, while accounting for societal needs, environmental limits and negative impacts both within and beyond Europe.
Explore the legal recognition of the Rights of Nature: Explore legislative reforms that recognise ecosystems as entities with intrinsic value and legal standing. This requires an assessment of the legal, institutional and governance implications of Rights of Nature approaches within the European context, clarifying the respective roles of the European Union, Member States, and the Council of Europe in supporting such reforms.
Explicitly embed justice in biodiversity governance: Treat justice as an explicit and context-dependent policy objective by creating formal opportunities for deliberation and negotiation, addressing power asymmetries, recognising diverse knowledge systems and distributional impacts, incorporating non-human and intergenerational interests, and strengthening accountability
Prioritise context-specific adaptation of policies: Reflect diverse social, economic, ecological, and cultural conditions through spatially-explicit analyses and improved data and research, helping to translate European ambitions into legitimate and effective action at national and local levels.
Institutionalise real-world enablers of transformative change: Embed lessons from successful initiatives into policy frameworks, including inclusive co-governance approaches, knowledge co-production, citizen science, economic realignment mechanisms such as Payments for Ecosystem Services, and integration of ecological principles into sectors that have traditionally operated independently of biodiversity considerations.
Adopt integrative spatial planning: Coordinate planning for multifunctional land and sea use to manage interactions within the biodiversity nexus and in densely populated areas like North-western Europe. Strengthen place-based governance and spatially explicit biodiversity strategies (e.g., ecological corridors and climate refugia), while integrating blue-green and transport infrastructure to generate co-benefits for biodiversity, climate and health.
Sustainability and Legacy
The BIONEXT Guidance provides a lasting set of tools, evidence and practical insights to support policy learning, implementation, and transformation beyond the project lifetime. These include:
The Guidance: An operational translation of transformative change and nexus principles tailored to the European policy context, supported by real-world examples and evidence-based policy options.
The BIONEXT Inspiration Tool: A database of 634 co-created transformative actions that can be filtered and adapted to context-specific policy challenges, nexus elements, and international targets (e.g., SDGs, KMGBF). Available through the OPPLA repository from Q4 of 2026.
Cross-sectoral synergies and trade-offs: Identification of potential win-win solutions and win-lose interactions to support more coherent policymaking.
Transformative modelling pathways: NaturAll (Nature for Nature), Dòigh Nàdair (Nature as Culture) and Return to Nature (Nature for Society), which illustrate the consequences of different levels of action versus inaction.
Strategic entry points for transformative change: 16 existing entry points within the EU policy cycle – including Impact Assessments, Strategic Foresight, participatory governance processes, science-policy-practice interfaces, monitoring and evaluation systems, and funding instruments – through which transformative change principles can be embedded and operationalised.
References:
Díaz-General, E., Piipponen-Doyle, S., Vaglica, V., Outhwaite, O., Lebleu, L., Rounsevell, M., Viesca-Ramírez, A., Harrison, P., Hebinck, A., de Pater, M., Lazurko, A., Ioannou, A., & Mustajoki, J. (2026). Guidance to Facilitate Transformative Change in Europe. Technical Report, Deliverable 4.2. BIONEXT project.
The project: BIONEXT is a research and innovation project that joins the fight for nature and biodiversity. The project produces new evidence to better understand biodiversity loss and demonstrates how biodiversity underpins every aspect of life; the water we drink, the food we eat, and our health. To secure and protect these values, the project demands transformative change: BIONEXT’s goal is a sustainable society, where links between biodiversity, water, food, energy, transport, climate, and health are acknowledged and nature and biodiversity are a part of everyday choices and policymaking.
Project coordinator: Finnish Environment Institute (Syke), (Finland)
Project partners: Dutch Research Institute for Transitions (DRIFT), (Netherlands); Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CzechGlobe), (Czech Republic); Athina-erevnitko kentro kainotomias stis technologies tis pliroforias, ton epikoinonion kai tis gnosis (ATHENA), (Greece); Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), (Germany); Oppla, (Netherlands); Foundation for Applied Information Technology in Environment, Agriculture and Global Changes (TIAMASG), (Romania); the University of Antwerp, (Belgium); The UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), (United Kingdom); UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), (United Kingdom)
Bionext Policy Brief | 8 | 2026
Driving Transformative Change for a Just and Sustainable Europe: Insights from Transdisciplinary Nexus Research
Authors: Elizabeth Díaz-General 1), Stella Piipponen-Doyle2)
1) Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT), 2) The UN Environment Program World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC)
Layout and infographics: Finnish Environment Institute (Syke)
Photo: Stock.adobe.com
Publisher: Finnish Environment Institute (Syke)
Helsinki 2026
ISBN 978-952-11-5885-8 (PDF)
DOI (Helda): 10.58013/43t3-dp60