Bridging biodiversity and food systems: 2025, a year to remember!

Together with our members, who are such a fantastic, highly diverse group, we realized a lot this year, structured around our four co-designed activities (see figure 1):

1. We established the partnership as a community model with supportive, collaborative and strategic membership options. We currently have members from over 150 different organisations worldwide, including government (15%), private sector (counting also farmer organisations) (20%), civil society (30%), research (30%) and network organisations (5%). One surprise is that without specific targeting for it, we have a spontaneous gender balance among our members, with 51% female and 49% male. Moreover, 31% of our members are under the age of 35 years old. We are proud of this rich diversity in the partnership, and we might not always fully agree on the exact pathways forward, but we are growing together towards more sustainable futures..

2. We co-developed a bundle of 10 use cases that illustrate very concretely how strengthening synergies and addressing tradeoffs between biodiversity and food can work in practice and what it actually takes. We thereby collaborated with partners from government, business, civil society, and research institutions to learn from and across very diverse entry points, scales and approaches. Together, these journeys point to a broader transformation and opportunities in which biodiversity and food are integrated to achieve benefits for both people and the planet. Represented as a beehive that can grow over time, the bundle has been triggering new conversations and welcomes contributions expanding our collective knowledge and joint learning.

3. We co-facilitated and contributed to a series of capacity and network building activities: 1) we integrated biodiversity packages in the food systems e-course; 2) we supported the 2025 youth innovation challenge on nature-based solutions with inspiration sessions and mentors; 3) we hosted a networking dinner with discussion questions on biodiversity and food systems alongside the UN Food Systems Summit in Addis Abeba; 4) we collaborated with several Dutch ministries and other partners to co-host the first NL-IPBES day on the Nexus and Transformative change assessments; 5) as part of a PBL-WUR study, we co-hosted a stakeholder dialogue on biodiversity narratives in food systems; 6) as part of NFP's World Food Day, we hosted a session and a booth on the launch of the use case bundle and the broader biodiversity- food systems partnership; 7) we co-hosted two sessions at the Climate COP 30 on the use cases at the nexus of climate, biodiversity and food; 8) we started a community process and collaboration with Convene to co-develop shared messages that will be continued in 2026.

4. We established a new collaborative partnership with ImpactHub-NL and Wasafiri to develop an incubator process that supports anchoring biodiversity-food system linkages in existing action coalitions and programs. Through an open challenge process, coalitions, programs, and/or organizations will be able to apply to participate in such an incubation process, supported by the community of partners. While we are currently in the phase where the exact form and shape of the incubator can still change, we do want to share that the first pilot of the incubator is planned to be launched in 2026.

In December, we created space to jointly reflect and learn from 2025, as part of the planning for 2026. This included a survey, a facilitated session and bilateral reflections. Key insights from this process include:

1. The Biodiversity and Food systems partnership serves multiple connected objectives (see figure 2). This first year has been particularly useful for cross-sectoral networking and partnerships building, knowledge sharing and joint learning (e.g. on how to make it work in practice), triggering changes in views, and increasing exposure to the biodiversity-food nexus as well as to organizations working on this nexus.

2. Members appreciate the co-creation and pluralistic space, and enthusiastically volunteer and engage in the various activities to their extent possible. During these processes, we have noticed that the biodiversity-food nexus speaks to people both in their professional and personal capacity. People’s commitment and passion for the topic is contagious. This important role of champions (who can be individuals, teams, organizations, countries,...) for transformative change on biodiversity and food has also come out as one of the cross-cutting learnings from the use cases.

3. For 2026, we aim to continue building upon the four core activities with additional focus and emphasis on 1) facilitation of further interactions between members e.g. through a light online platform, continued quarterly calls, and in-person opportunities; 2) co-development of shared messages to increase the biodiversity-food system nexus on local, national and global agendas in actionable ways, also with actors not typically active in this space; 3) enabling changes in actions and structures e.g. through the incubator; 4) collective actions and learnings e.g. through co-creation and co-learning activities.

Taking together, as a community we aim to continue contributing to

• Wider and stronger connections, mutual understanding and trust among biodiversity and food systems actors

• Collective capacity and agency to raise food-biodiversity interdependencies on local, national and global agendas and investment portfolios.

• Reduced risks and increased benefits of actions & investments in biodiversity-food synergies through joint learning, concrete examples, shared capacity building and complementary roles

• Innovative collective actions & initiatives as spin-offs of facilitated networking, incubator, co-creation and co-learning processes

We are very grateful for our joint achievements and learnings in 2025. Inspired and with a lot of energy, we look forward to continuing working together for people and our planet in 2026.

We welcome you to: join us in this journey!