Revising our way to program and support research to tackle the scientific issues of nature-based solutions: the case of France institutions

In this talk, we will present an innovative French program on Biodiversity and Nature Based Solutions, SOLU-BIOD, driven by the CNRS and INRAe. This is an ambitious (>44 Mio€), long term (9 years) transformative (systemic) program, part of an investment plan of the French Government, which will address the challenges of implementing innovative NbS by tackling three main issues:

(i) an organizational challenge: SOLU-BIOD will structure in France the community of research and practice on NbS in an unprecedented way by making possible highly inter- and transdisciplinary research;  (ii) scientific challenges: SOLU-BIOD will enable highly innovative research, in particular on the roles of biodiversity facets (in particular genetic diversity and evolutionary potential) for NbS; the importance of social processes (legislation frameworks, social norms, financing and governance systems) underlying NbS; the approaches and criteria to assess the effectiveness of NbS with the necessity to go beyond a case-by-case approach; and the creation of models and development of scenarios to design and assess NbS for the forthcoming decades. These scientific challenges will be addressed for four priority cases of NbS, namely NbS based on protected area networks, NbS in agricultural/natural mosaics, urban NbS and coastal NbS; (iii) a knowledge transfer, education and training challenge: SOLU-BIOD will profoundly change access to data and scientific knowledge and capacity building on NbS, through rethinking higher education and academic and continuing training and creating unprecedented access to expertise on these types of solutions in French territories. We will present more particularly the national network of living labs on NbS established by SOLU-BIOD and the research conducted therein.