Beyond human: BC3’s Small Sherpa Project that reimagines urban nature through art and storytelling
BC3 presents the Activity Report of 2025
BC3 reviews the key milestones achieved in 2025 and looks ahead to advancing its transdisciplinary research through six strategic objectives in its latest Annual Activity Report. Over the past year, the centre brought together more than 130 researchers from 21 countries and collaborated with over 240 organisations across 41 countries, with the mission of co-creating transdisciplinary knowledge, tools, and evidence-based solutions for resilient, fair, and inclusive sustainable futures.
Among the year’s key highlights, in March 2025, BC3 hosted nearly 100 global experts for the first Lead Author Meeting of the 2027 IPCC Methodology Report on Inventories for Short-lived Climate Forcers. The meeting was co-organised with the IPCC Task Force Bureau on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, the Spanish Office for Climate Change (OECC), and the Basque Government.
BC3 also continued its efforts to translate data and scientific knowledge into climate policy, actively collaborating with the ONAC and coordinating inputs and proposals for the working document of the State Pact against the Climate Emergency. In addition, the centre signed a contract with the United Nations Statistics Division to develop the second iteration of the ARIES platform, providing headline indicator models for the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. ARIES reached more than 6,700 users across five continents, generating over 60,000 system requests, and launched the e-learning programme ‘From Open to Integrated Science’.
Scientific breakthroughs
With 118 indexed publications, 119 H-index, and 13,447 citations in academic journals, BC3 also achieved several scientific breakthroughs during 2025.
For example, the center published relevant research on Black Carbon impacts on the K2 glacier, microalgal bloom thresholds in Greenland, and high-mountain climate vulnerability.
BC3 also advised Spain’s MITECO on the ETS2 emissions trading scheme and Social Climate Plan, while developing GCAM-Europe to map European energy, land, water, and emissions systems.
The science team of the Basque entity synthesized global data across 19 countries to set habitat quantity and quality thresholds for insect pollinators, and reconciled land-based carbon removal accounting definitions under the Paris Agreement.
Co-creation of local adaptive initiatives, including the One Health Living Lab in the Butron Watershed and natural insurance models in the Palancia Watershed, was another highlight of the last year’s activity.
Overall, BC3 took part in 34 European projects, 4 ERC grants (3 active, 1 new), and 2 MSCA individual fellowships. Moreover, 9 people completed their PhD theses.
The complete Activity Report of BC3 is available here.
