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Unlocking nature’s potential across systems, sectors and budgets

Unlocking nature’s potential across the budget lines

Resource description:

Nature-based Solutions can deliver benefits across multiple policy areas, sectors and budgets, creating opportunities to scale up investment and support the transition towards a nature-positive economy.

This European Commission factsheet presents four examples from transport, water management, landscape architecture and insurance. It highlights key barriers to investment in Nature-based Solutions and identifies opportunities to embed nature more systematically across public budgets, business models and economic sectors.

The factsheet is based on the outcomes of the 2026 EU Green Week partner event “Unlocking nature’s potential across the budget lines”, co-organised by NetworkNature and the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation on 2 June 2026. The event explored how Nature-based Solutions can contribute to a competitive and resilient nature-positive economy by unlocking investment across sectors and existing budget lines.

Author/Contact:

European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation

Publication date:

Sustainable Development Goals:

  • 6. Clean water and sanitation

  • 11. Sustainable cities and communities

  • 12. Responsible consumption and production

  • 13. Climate action

  • 15. Life on land

  • 17. Partnerships for the goals

  • 1.b Create sound policy frameworks at the national, regional and international levels, based on pro-poor and gender-sensitive development strategies, to support accelerated investment in poverty eradication actions

  • 2.a Increase investment, including through enhanced international cooperation, in rural infrastructure, agricultural research and extension services, technology development and plant and livestock gene banks in order to enhance agricultural productive capacity in developing countries, in particular least developed countries

  • 11.2 By 2030, provide access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all, improving road safety, notably by expanding public transport, with special attention to the needs of those in vulnerable situations, women, children, persons with disabilities and older persons

  • 11.4 Strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world‘s cultural and natural heritage

  • 11.a Support positive economic, social and environmental links between urban, peri-urban and rural areas by strengthening national and regional development planning

  • 11.b By 2020, substantially increase the number of cities and human settlements adopting and implementing integrated policies and plans towards inclusion, resource efficiency, mitigation and adaptation to climate change, resilience to disasters, and develop and implement, in line with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, holistic disaster risk management at all levels

  • 12.7 Promote public procurement practices that are sustainable, in accordance with national policies and priorities

  • 13.1 Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries

  • 13.2 Integrate climate change measures into national policies, strategies and planning

  • 15.3 By 2030, combat desertification, restore degraded land and soil, including land affected by desertification, drought and floods, and strive to achieve a land degradation-neutral world

  • 15.5 Take urgent and significant action to reduce the degradation of natural habitats, halt the loss of biodiversity and, by 2020, protect and prevent the extinction of threatened species

  • 15.9 By 2020, integrate ecosystem and biodiversity values into national and local planning, development processes, poverty reduction strategies and accounts

  • 15.a Mobilize and significantly increase financial resources from all sources to conserve and sustainably use biodiversity and ecosystems

  • 15.b Mobilize significant resources from all sources and at all levels to finance sustainable forest management and provide adequate incentives to developing countries to advance such management, including for conservation and reforestation

  • 17.16 Enhance the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development, complemented by multi-stakeholder partnerships that mobilize and share knowledge, expertise, technology and financial resources, to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals in all countries, in particular developing countries

  • 17.17 Encourage and promote effective public, public-private and civil society partnerships, building on the experience and resourcing strategies of partnerships