Mapping the Biodiversity–Climate Nexus in EU Research Portfolios

Biodiversity loss, climate change and related water–food–health risks are increasingly framed as interconnected crises, yet research and innovation (R&I) investments are still largely organized and evaluated along separate sectoral lines. This contribution presents a scalable, portfolio-level tool to assess the extent and location of integrated biodiversity nexus framings within EU research portfolios, using the biodiversity–climate interface as an operational starting point.

We analyze 53,871 EU Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe projects, implemented between 2014 and 2025, from the EU CORDIS Open Access database using a two stage text-mining approach applied to project keywords, titles and objectives. Stage 1 employs a broad, validated query on the keywords field to map the wider biodiversity- and climate-relevant landscape. Term frequencies and co-occurrence networks reveal an R&I ecosystem in which environmental aims are frequently embedded within digital, energy and systems-innovation agendas. Stage 2 then applies a strict Boolean AND filter on the keywords field to isolate projects that explicitly co-frame biodiversity and climate. The resulting integration core comprises 118 projects whose term usage and co-occurrence patterns are dominated by biodiversity, climate change, ecosystems and ecosystem services, adaptation, resilience and nature-based solutions, and whose stated aims are strongly oriented towards policy, knowledge and modelling for decision support.

The approach delivers two types of insights: First, it distinguishes between a broad “adjacent” innovation ecosystem relevant to biodiversity and climate research, and a narrowly, explicitly nexus-framed core, allowing us to quantify how rare integrated framings remain and to characterize the thematic structures where they occur. Second, it provides a transparent, reproducible template that can be extended by adding water, food and health term sets, thereby operationalizing biodiversity nexus diagnostics at portfolio scale. The contribution concludes by discussing how this mapping can inform capacity-building and governance innovations, and help align future funding, training and cross-sector partnerships with genuinely integrated biodiversity–climate–water–food–health responses.