Over the last two decades, a significant conceptual shift has taken place within the EU and the broader scientific community regarding the environmental sustainability of productive systems. The focus has progressively moved beyond the mere assessment of environmental harm towards the active quantification of positive contributions to ecosystem services and nature-based benefits. Current EU legislative frameworks on Agriculture and Environment reflect a clear convergence toward a set of rules and best practices aimed at fostering healthy, resilient, and productive ecosystems, while simultaneously preserving EU competitiveness.

Ecosystem health and integrity emerge from the intricate interplay of structural and functional components, where ecosystem services are deeply interconnected within a holistic framework. Among the various criteria that define ecosystem health, biodiversity stands out as both the most fundamental and the most challenging to operationalize. It is inherently complex, multifunctional, and multilayered, defying simple quantification through a single metric. Biodiversity encompasses genetic diversity, species richness, and the variety of ecosystems. It manifests through composition, structure and function. Each of these dimensions may translate into distinct and sometimes competing operational targets for agricultural management, posing considerable challenges for EU regulations and certification schemes applied to agro-productions, which struggle to establish universally applicable metrics and practices that simultaneously ensure biodiversity protection, agronomic productivity, and cost-benefit sustainability.

In this contribution, challenges and opportunities connected to the integration of biodiversity and nature-based benefits into land management strategies are discussed.