Mapping the Biodiversity, Climate, and Health Nexus: an Analysis of Horizon Europe research projects

Addressing the interconnected challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and human health requires a shift from fragmented governance toward integrated actions. This study applies an analytical framework combining Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modelling and network analysis to systematically map the Biodiversity, Climate, and Health (BCH) nexus within the Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe research portfolios. Drawing on a targeted subset of 158 policy-relevant projects from the CORDIS database, the analysis identifies underlying thematic structures and patterns of collaboration. The results show that dual-component integration (BC, CH or BH) predominates across the portfolio, while BCH relevance remains relatively rare, identifying in only 28 projects. Despite this, average project-level indicators (e.g. funding & consortium size) remain largely unchanged across dual-component and BCH relevance projects. Differences become more apparent at the thematic level, where BCH relevance is associated with ecosystem services, urban health, and nature-based solutions, whereas dual-component projects are more concentrated in circular-economy and climate-oriented domains. Research centres and higher education institutions were the predominant organisation types however, integrated BCH projects, exhibited greater involvement of private-sector organisations but lower representation of public-sector compared with dual-component projects, underscoring the need for stronger public-sector engagement to support policy translation. Together, these findings underscore the need for more balanced, cross-sectoral research strategies that strengthen biodiversity-climate-health relevance and support the translation of nature-based and other integrated approaches into coordinated and actionable policy frameworks.