The Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity (KCBD) team just published a major paper on their core work regarding the monitoring of the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 (EU BDS).

This paper, published in Ecological Indicators introduces the tools used by the European Commission to monitor the EU BDS to the research community. Although these tools, the actions tracker and the dashboard, are both publicly available to transparently track the progress in implementing the EU BDS since 2021, what they are and how they work is not yet well-known by a wide audience, and in particular the research community. This reduces the potential benefit from these tools in informing a wider community of users about the EU BDS targets and actions, and may in turn hamper their understanding of biodiversity policy needs, and the use of all the relevant biodiversity knowledge for monitoring and implementing the EU BDS.

This paper will contribute to overcome this issue. Indeed, once researchers know how these tools work and which gaps still need to be filled, they will be able to determine whether and how to better engage with them. Specifically, further developing indicators to fill the dashboard’s gaps is an excellent opportunity to strengthen the connection between researchers and policymakers around concrete policy needs to support the implementation of the EU BDS.