The EU Farm to Fork (F2F) Strategy and the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, adopted in the first half of 2020, have underscored the role that the agriculture and forestry sectors should play in tackling climate change, protecting the environment and preserving or restoring biodiversity. Exploratory scenario analyses in the ‘Clean Planet for All’ Communication5 identified important linkages between these objectives that may either work together or in some cases be antagonistic. Such challenges call for significant advances in integrated land-use planning and policy design. With the call for tender ENV/2020/OP/0014 the European Commission’s Directorate General for the Environment has identified the need to explore the potential synergies between the climate change and biodiversity agenda with scenarios and models projecting the expected biodiversity and climate change outcomes of alternative policies, and to identify policy bundles that maximize positive outcomes for both.

The BIOCLIMA consortium has responded to this call with a proposal whose overarching goal is to provide a robust ex-ante assessment of the possible impacts and synergies of current EU policies on biodiversity and climate.