Long-term impact

Our long-term impact is an efficient integration of biodiversity considerations in financial decision-making halting and restoring biodiversity loss. To work towards our long-term impact, we have identified 10 short term impacts and categorised them under our four pathways towards impact.

Short term impact

1. Scientific Novelty

• Novel approaches able to capture impact on multidimensional biodiversity.
  As the inclusion of biodiversity’s needs in financial and industrial decision-making is a relatively new and highly complex endeavour, we will adapt and develop approaches that efficiently and transparently capture impact along value chains on multiple dimensions of biodiversity.

• New strategies and business models for the improvement of quantification and integration biodiversity. Capturing the impacts on biodiversity is not enough to reach our long-term goal, and we will therefore develop clear and usable strategies for how biodiversity considerations can enter into decision-making processes. This includes the development of new types of services and competences.

2. Understanding & Awareness

• Open-source platform for educational material to increase the understanding of the needs of biodiversity.
  The two major reasons for lack of biodiversity considerations in financial and industrial decision making is lack of approaches (see point 1 above) and lack of understanding. To target the latter, BIOPATH will support an increased understanding of the needs of biodiversity through educational and information material provided open source. Most of this material will be designed jointly with our partners to target their needs, but some will target university students to open their interest for the topic.

• Awareness and understanding of the importance of biodiversity among partners and target groups.
  To ensure that it is not only the needs of our partners that will be considered the open-source platform will also contain informational material of a more general character and target the financial system and industry, public authorities as well as the general public e.g., in their role as consumers.

3. Co-development of innovative approaches

• Institutionalised inter- and trans-disciplinary structures for policy and tool innovation.
  Reaching the longterm goal requires global concerted efforts to include biodiversity considerations in financial and industrial decision-making. For this purpose, we will develop strong collaboration structures between decisionmakers, academia and other actors.

• An online based configurator facilitating efficient integration of biodiversity into financial decision.
  To navigate in different paths of impact in the value chain will be complex and different parts of the financial system, and industry will need tailored support. The online configurator will provide an overview and support decision-makers to take biodiversity consideration to the next level.

• A set of approaches to be further co-developed in BIOPATH hub.
  The path to improved and useful approaches to estimate impacts on biodiversity is complex, resulting in a need to develop targeted approaches to some partners. Approaches developed by BIOPATH will constitute an important ground for further innovative co-development with our present and additional partners expanding beyond our initial focus-areas (agriculture, forestry and energy).

4. Policy & Capacity building

• Effectively combined private and public governance approaches for biodiversity consideration.
  The governance of biodiversity is complex with a combined role of the public (nature conservation) and private (consideration of biodiversity impacts) sector. To reach biodiversity targets, there needs to be an efficient alignment between the role of the state and the private sector. BIOPATH therefore explore and innovate how public and private governance can benefit biodiversity in a complementary way.

• Motivation and support for Swedish and international actors in the financial system and industry to integrate biodiversity into decision-making.
  An important catalyst to reach the long-term goal is to demonstrate best practices for how biodiversity can be integrated into decision-making processes. Our partners have come on-board to act as champions in relation to their area of interest. We contend that showcasing the efforts of these champions will be a key enabler of broad uptake of BIOPATH’s approaches.

• Advanced international dialogue on the role of industry and financial system in safe-guarding biodiversity.
  Even if the issue of biodiversity is high on international and national agendas, there is a need of larger focus on operational approaches. BIOPATH will continue to raise biodiversity concerns on the global arena through multiple means. Our innovative approaches will feed into discussions on how biodiversity concerns can be considered in international work in the science-policy interface including that by IPBES.