Description
Together with the climate changes and the finite amounts of resources, the loss of bio- diversity is one of the major global socio-ecological problems to tackle. Land use, degradation and destruction was identified as the major cause of biodiversity loss. The fact that all areas, even small or urban, are suitable places to work on countering this loss justifies that actions are conducted on the sites used for high energy physics. But such sites also have specific characteristics – such as a long-term, stable and non-profit governance, or the presence of technical zones – which are important advantages for biodiversity. This makes the new particle physics sites foreseen in the future projects key places that can play a significant role in increasing the local biodiversity, also because, as academic sites, they can host original projects on environment and sustainability sciences. In the last two decades, numerous studies and projects have addressed biodiversity at the scale of a building, a district, or a town: reliable knowledge and tools are therefore available to organize such new sites. However, these works also show that to obtain the best results, biodiversity must be included from the beginning of the project in the reflections about the design and organization of a site.
