SPARK4B+: Turning the Unimaginable into the Future

Alternative Socio-Economic Models for Biodiversity- Positive Just Futures

SPARK4B+ is a new Horizon Europe initiative, bringing together 18 partners from eight European countries and Colombia to explore and test growth-oriented economic models to mitigate biodiversity loss and social inequality. The FABLE Consortium will play a key role in the initiative by connecting future visions, modeling pathways, and driving policy action.

Societies need to be able to imagine different futures before they can begin to build them. Yet, alternative pathways often remain elusive. Degrowth, the wellbeing economy, ecosystem-based governance and related practices exist, but frequently only at a small scale and in a fragmented manner; they are rarely institutionalized and largely untested.

SPARK4B+ (Strengthening Pathways for Alternative Socio-economic Paradigms and Governance Frameworks and Responsible Knowledge and Action for Biodiversity-Positive and Just Futures), a new Horizon Europe project, sets out to make these pathways attainable.

Launched in September 2026, the four-year project will bring communities, researchers, policymakers and practitioners together to envision biodiversity-positive and just futures and test these pathways in practice. The project works across six countries and seven sectors – from farming to forestry, water, finance, health, education, and cities. Across these diverse contexts, communities will envision the future they want, with researchers and practitioners modelling pathways for implementation and developing action plans to explore how these futures become a reality.

From Alternative Ideas to Practical Pathways

SPARK4B+ starts by mapping alternative paradigms and building the tools to test them, including participatory visioning methods linked with biodiversity and climate and economic models that visualize trade-offs. Those tools are then applied across the seven sectors. For instance, in Hohenlohe, Germany, farmers coordinate flower strips and grassland management across farm boundaries rather than field by field. In Galicia, Spain, commons communities manage over a quarter of the region's land, taking on invasive species and monoculture. In Warwickshire, UK, blended finance restores the Avon catchment. In the Bogotá Highlands, Colombia, agroecological curricula and biodiversity storytelling elevate environmental education. In Sweden, forest owners ask whether mixed stands can hold up against drought, fire, and pests. In Budapest, Hungary, under-used parks and cemeteries are reimagined as spaces for mental and physical restoration.

Each SPARK4B+ site operates in two stages: (1) A Transformation Lab where stakeholders imagine a biodiversity-positive and just future; and (2) a Demonstration Intervention where the best idea is trialed and measured for biodiversity, climate resilience, social equity, and economic value.

FABLE’s Role

The FABLE Consortium will contribute its expertise in modeling pathways, stakeholder engagement, and coordination to support future visioning for the project. It will advance future-visioning methodologies, develop and refine quantitative models and tools, and co-create alternative scenarios and pathways with stakeholders through the Transformation Labs (T-Labs).

The FABLE Calculator methodology will be applied, further developed, and coupled with the Agence Française Developpement’s modelling tool, GEMMES, and other relevant modelling approaches. FABLE will also support the adaptation, development, and linkages of existing models in country case studies, including those in Sweden and Colombia.

FABLE will further contribute to translating the future scenarios created in T-labs into visual and experiential representations of alternative futures through immersive experiences. This will be an important tool for testing, exploring, and imagining the futures we want to create. Alongside modelling and visioning, FABLE will play a key role in ensuring the science-policy-action connection, ensuring cross-case knowledge and the upscaling of results to the policy level, in the EU and beyond.

Project Outcomes

The project will produce three qualitative toolboxes with more than 50 methods and documented real-world case studies, alongside a dedicated AI/Virtual Reality toolbox for immersive stakeholder engagement and an interactive modelling dashboard for exploring trade-offs and synergies.

Project findings will reach decision-makers through policy briefs, a synthesis report, and at policy events; and through documentaries, exhibitions, online courses, and work with artists.

In addition to these efforts, SPARK4B+ will build coalitions of champions to ensure that the project’s learnings are institutionalized and continue long after the intervention.

A Multidisciplinary International Consortium

SPARK4B+ is coordinated by Coventry University through its Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR), and co-coordinated by GreenFormation (Hungary). The wider consortium, which includes FABLE, brings together universities, research institutes, SMEs, civil-society organizations and policy actors from across Europe and Colombia. The project is further supported by an Advisory and Influencers Board, connecting perspectives from Europe, Latin America, Africa, and beyond.

For more information, visit www.spark4b.eu and www.fableconsortium.org.