The European Biodiversa+ Partnership has announced that its new transnational research call will focus on Nature-based Solutions for Biodiversity, Human Well-being and Transformative Change (BiodivNBS).

The call, which will officially launch on September 11, 2023, aims to support transnational, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary biodiversity research to better understand the underlying tipping points, trade-offs and mechanisms that affect nature-based solutions, as well as their successful implementation generating benefits for nature, human well-being and societal transformation.

To this end, three areas of research will be explored. On the one hand, the synergies and trade-offs of nature-based solutions in the context of human well-being will be explored. Another area will be nature-based solutions to mitigate anthropogenic causes of biodiversity loss. And finally, the contribution of nature-based solutions for just transformative change.

The application procedure will be carried out in two stages, electronically. First, a preliminary proposal submission in English is due in early November 2023. Once the first evaluation of preliminary proposals has been organized, full proposals will be submitted in English in early April 2024. Information regarding submission, eligibility and evaluation criteria, as well as other valuable information, will be published, together with the official announcement of the call for proposals, early next September.

To be eligible, research consortia will have to include teams from a minimum of 3 countries financially participating in the call, including at least 2 from EU Member States or countries associated to the EU. However, it should be noted that not all EU member states or associated countries will participate financially in this call. In fact, in this phase, 34 countries, together with the European Commission, including Spain, have provisionally set aside an overall budget of more than 40 million euros. Likewise, the updated list of potential participating countries will be published on the Biodiversa+ website.

Although the evaluation criteria for the call will also be published in September, with the official launch of the BiodivNBS call, it has been revealed that research proposals will be evaluated by independent experts against the following criteria:

• Appropriateness to the scope of the call, novelty of the research and impact in step 1 (pre-proposal phase).
• Excellence, quality and efficiency of implementation (of the project plan) and impact (including expected social impact (including political impact), and stakeholder engagement approach) in phase 2 (full proposal phase).

Research projects are expected to be transnational, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary and to mobilize, as necessary, the natural sciences, technical sciences, social sciences and humanities. Thus, in both phases, the international added value of the project presented must be clearly presented.