Resource description:
This report synthesises the key policy, research, and innovation highlights generated through the Horizon Europe project BioValue. Operating between 2022 and 2025, BioValue explored how spatial planning can become a transformative driver for biodiversity, moving beyond impact mitigation to actively enhance ecological value.
The report provides an integrated overview of the project’s methodological advances, practical innovations, and policy-relevant insights. Central to BioValue is the integration of three instrumental lenses—Spatial Planning and Management Instruments (SP&MI), Environmental Assessment Instruments (EAI), and Economic and Financial Instruments (E&FI)—as a coherent strategy to embed biodiversity in spatial planning systems. This triadic integration demonstrates how regulatory, assessment, and financial tools can be combined to deliver biodiversity-positive development at multiple territorial scales.
The report highlights BioValue’s work in three Arenas for Transformation (Italy, Portugal, Germany), where real-world spatial planning contexts were used to experiment with co-created tools, assess institutional feasibility, and test innovative planning approaches. These arenas enabled the development and validation of key outputs such as the PIECES Framework for Ecosystem Services Assessment, an enhanced mitigation hierarchy supported by systems thinking, pathways for operationalising EU sustainable finance tools, and reconceptualised spatial planning cycle grounded in adaptive governance.
The document also highlights BioValue’s Recommendations, Catalogue of Instruments, and Cards Game, all designed to support planners, policymakers, and practitioners in strengthening biodiversity integration.
Finally, the report offers a multi-level set of policy reform priorities for European, national, and local governance. These include enhancing regulatory mandates for biodiversity, mainstreaming ecosystem services in planning and assessment, improving vertical coordination, and aligning planning processes with EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030, the Nature Restoration Law, the Green Deal, and the EU Taxonomy Regulation.
Overall, this resource provides a consolidated and accessible synthesis of BioValue’s contributions to policy, research, and innovation fostering transformative spatial planning across Europe.
Author/Contact:
Universidade de Lisboa – Instituto Superior Técnico
Contributor: Universidade de Lisboa – Instituto Superior Técnico
Contact: Maria Partidário, mariapartidario@tecnico.ulisboa.pt