Sea Seminar: BIONEXT The Biodiversity Nexus: Transformative Change for Sustainability

Prof. Anna-Stiina Heiskanen

Biodiversity is essential for ecosystem services that are underpinning for food production, water availability, and human health. There is substantial damage being inflicted by human activities, including habitat destruction for the expansion of food production, energy and transport systems, river fragmentation due to dams and reservoirs, and agricultural intensification affecting habitat quality. Robust joined-up policies and actions across all sectors are needed to effectively protect biodiversity.

The BIONEXT project is aiming to provide decisionmakers with knowledge and tools to effectively counteract biodiversity decline. The project has co-created with stakeholders desirable futures and multiple just transition pathways that produce actionable policy options to promote nature-positive transformative change. We have built a nexus modelling platform to develop projections for alternative pathways. Building on these analyses, BIONEXT is working on a tool designed to deliver options to mainstream biodiversity into diverse policies that govern the biodiversity nexus.

Anna-Stiina Heiskanen is Unit Director and Professor of the Marine and Freshwater Solutions Unit at the Finnish Environment Institute (Syke). She has wide experience of the research of freshwater and marine environments on a global, European, regional, and national level and the development of sustainable solutions for the management of water resources and ecosystems. Dr. Heiskanen has a Ph.D. in Hydrobiology and a title of Docent (Adjunct Professor) in Marine Biology from the University of Helsinki.

Heiskanen has co-authored more than 150 scientific, technical, and popular publications, focusing on assessment and ecosystem-based management of aquatic system. She has wide experience in leadership of national and international research projects. Her current research activities include co-development of transformative solutions towards sustainable and nature-positive innovative nature-based solutions as the coordinator of the Horizon Europe Project BIONEXT The Biodiversity Nexus: Transformative Change for Sustainability.

The Sea Seminar series is a collaboration between the ÅAU profiling area The Sea and SOS. The seminars are organized once a month with a hybrid setup (click here for online participation), and they are open to everyone interested in marine and sustainability issues.