The Research and Innovation Workshop, organised on May 15th and 16th, offered an opportunity for relevant projects from the 2017-2018 COFUND call on « scenarios of biodiversity and ecosystem services » to engage with new stakeholders from the private sector. The main goal was to support the development of scenarios of biodiversity and ecosystem services that are useful for and usable by private sector stakeholders. This workshop was thus meant to spur new collaborations between stakeholders and relevant projects from this call attending the workshop.
Following an introduction to the meeting by Mari Solerod, from the Research Council of Norway, and Frédéric Lemaître, science-society and science-policy officer for BiodivERsA, participants were sorted into two groups of discussion. In each of those groups, the coordinators of the research projects made a short presentation of their project, stressing their relevance to either sustainable agriculture, forestry or tourism. The rest of the day was dedicated to discussions between researchers and stakeholders, organised in three thematic sessions on agriculture, aquaculture and urbanism respectively. Participants left the meeting with new contacts and very concrete plans for new collaborations within their projects, as well as pointers on knowledge needs from the private sector and related ideas for new research projects.