Halting biodiversity loss and restoring ecosystems is extremely urgent as also confirmed by the findings of the recent 'State of Nature in the EU' report. On 20th October within the context of the EU Green Week 2020, the Policy Learning Platform hosted a webinar discussing how to improve policies to protect and restore nature.  Speakers from the European Commission, the Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP) and from the Interreg Europe projects BID-REX and BIOGOV, attended the workshop.

The relevance of the BID-REX project within this webinar and consequently also within the context of the 2030 EU Biodiversity Strategy, is to highlight how biodiversity information is key to achieve a greater impact and to provide examples on how policies and actions at a regional level can facilitate this process. Gerard Bota from the Forest Sciences and Technology Center of Catalonia, attended the event to share with the audience some of the key messages that emerged the during BID-REX thematic workshops and reported on the good practices that were identified during the course of the project.

One of the key messages that Gerard Bota conveyed during the webinar was that “Good policy decisions are based on good quality information. Therefore, an environment of collaboration and mutual trust between data providers and users is crucial for sound policy making.”

The BID-REX key messages and good practices are compiled in the technical document “Better data, better policies: increasing the impact of biodiversity information”.

Webinar recording, presentations and further information is available here.