Our global economy is intrinsically dependent on nature, and at the same time is playing a major role in its degradation. Recognition of this fact has grown substantially in the past decade, as evidenced in the EU Biodiversity strategy for 2030. However, transformative, system-wide changes are still needed to achieve the nature-positive outcomes required to 'bend the curve' of biodiversity loss. While the business case for economic actors to address biodiversity is becoming clearer in some sectors, it is still lacking in others, particularly those more removed from direct interactions with nature. SUSTAIN (Strengthening Understanding and Strategies of business To Assess and Integrate Nature) will bring together a multi-stakeholder and multi-disciplinary team to strengthen understanding and awareness of how all economic activities depend and impact on biodiversity. The project will build on existing work within the business and biodiversity space to develop and validate a database of business dependencies and impacts, develop methods that actors can use to reduce biodiversity-related risks, and a toolbox to support their application. The consortium will drive uptake of these resources through dissemination of targeted business case materials, drawing on existing networks and expertise in communicating with businesses, financial institutions and other key stakeholders.

The overall goal of A-Track is to consolidate and mainstream activities to accelerate transformation in organisations, such that, by end of project, a critical mass of businesses, financial institutions, and governments, integrate the value of natural capital in their decision-making, helping to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. In doing so, A-Track will contribute to delivery of the European Green Deal. A-Track builds on existing initiatives and best practice to develop, pilot, test, demonstrate and scale innovations in this space. Specifically, A-Track will: (1) develop and demonstrate the use of robust information pathways that facilitate flows of biodiversity information for use in business and financial decisions, and the compilation of public and private sector natural capital accounts; (2) strengthen the life cycle assessment of biodiversity and ecosystem services footprints for products and organisations, integrating and further mainstreaming these with natural capital approaches and materiality assessment practices; (3) mainstream and advance natural capital assessment and accounting in businesses and their integration in decision-making across key sectors and business functions; (4) facilitate and incentivize the adoption and scaling of nature-positive business models; (5) nurture financial innovations to scale nature-positive finance based on reliable natural capital data and practice. Emphasis is placed on integration, synthesis and wide engagement across this work. This will deliver wider impacts, in Europe and beyond (through global value chains), in terms of enhanced natural capital and biodiversity, enhanced competitivity of European businesses in the new nature economy, and improved wellbeing derived from enhanced ecosystem services. A-Track brings together an intersectoral and interdisciplinary consortium of leading players who are involved in many of the key related front-runner initiatives across this space, ensuring appropriate synergies.

The importance of biodiversity (BD) and healthy ecosystems and the services they deliver has increasingly been acknowledged. Policy initiatives, such as the EU BD Strategies 2020 and 2030, IPBES, IPCC and CBD were launched to address BD, natural capital and related values. Research has created a knowledge base to better understand nature-human interactions that are at the base of ecosystem services (ES) delivery. The key aim of related actions is to provide robust information that can be harnessed to support protection, restoration and sustainable as well as climate-neutral use of ecosystems in the EU by 2030. MAES has provided the conceptual, methodological and data base for comprehensive assessments on different spatial scales, including the EU-wide assessment (2020) and assessments in EU member states. Knowledge and data for different ecosystem types (including protected and marine areas) are increasingly available. The next step is to integrate the different MAES components (ecosystem mapping, condition, ES, accounting) and to enable the uptake of ES in decision making. Key challenges include the proof of BD-ecosystem condition-ES relationships and to link them to EU policies. The consortium brings together experts from all EU member states, associated countries and EU overseas regions with stakeholders from various public and private sectors. The expertise in the consortium includes leading experts (ecologists, economists, social scientists) on ES science, ecosystem accounting and on science-policy-business interfaces from related actions (OpenNESS, ESMERALDA, MAIA, MAES, ESP, IPBES, BD Partnership). Therefore, the project will successfully address the call's challenges and provide applicable tools and models together with guidance how to use them. The project will deliver real cases for an evidence-, ES-based and harmonised decision making across Europe, enabling transformative change to halt BD decline and to secure essential ES-sustainable supply and use.