Better understanding, anticipating and addressing the biodiversity benefits and impacts of the clean and digital industries

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Expected Outcome: Proposals are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes: society, end-users, industry and decision makers better understand, anticipate and address biodiversity impacts of Europe’s reindustrialisation and decarbonisation across the value chain, from the demand-side and the design and operational phase to the end-of-life and waste phases, thus preserving biodiversity and ecosystem services by choosing least-harm transition options; society, end-users, industry and decision makers understand the benefits and impacts on biodiversity of societal, political, economic and technological choices, taking into account the direct, indirect and cumulative, and spatial and temporal dimensions, thus avoiding burden-shifting across ecosystems, regions and value chains; clean and digital industries are more resilient and provided with solutions to mitigate their impacts on terrestrial, marine and freshwater ecosystems and work towards a nature-positive economy, in line the EU Taxonomy and the Do No Significant Harm principle. Scope: One of the EU’s biggest priorities is to achieve the sovereign clean transition and digital transition. The Clean Industrial Deal is Europe’s plan to improve competitiveness and reduce carbon emissions through circularity, focusing on energy-intensive sectors and clean technology, including the critical raw materials and energy infrastructure that supports them. The European Union also aims to lead the digital transition and the AI revolution, notably through the construction of data centres. These sectors contribute to climate mitigation and broader environmental objectives, by moving away from the fossil-based, non-circular, business-as-usual models. However, as the IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment states, it is necessary to address the biodiversity impacts and dependencies of these industries and the underlying societal demand to reduce trade-offs and foster nature-positive benefits. By equipping stakeholders with practical and science-based decision-support capabilities, this topic aims to enhance the biodiversity performance of these industries compared to the status quo, increase public acceptance and deliver a wider range of benefits to society. Industries in scope of this topic are all European-based industries relevant to the Clean Industrial Deal, and the digital and artificial intelligence industry including the European-based physical infrastructures directly supporting them (i.e. transport, energy production and electricity grid, mining, extractive and mineral processing, data centres, etc.). Data-intensive industries, in particular Intellectual Property rights industries and copyright, should be supported in assessing the biodiversity impacts of their digital production and consumption. This topic is expected to support the objectives of EU biodiversity strategy for 2030, the Critical Raw Materials Act, the Clean Industrial Deal roadmap and to support stakeholders in…