Based on a better understanding of terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, ALARM will develop and test methods and protocols for the assessment of large-scale environmental risks in order to minimise negative direct and indirect human impacts. Research focuses on the assessment and forecast of changes in biodiversity and in the structure, function, and dynamics of ecosystems. This relates to ecosystem services in the broadest sense including the relationships between society, the economy and biodiversity. In particular, risks to biodiversity will be assessed that arise from climate change, environmental chemicals, biological invasions and pollinator loss in the context of current and potential future European socio-economic development options and their respective land use patterns. There are an increasing number of case studies on the environmental risks from each of these impacts. This is yielding an improved understanding on how these risks act individually and affect living systems. However, the knowledge on how they act in concert is poor and ALARM will be the first research initiative with the critical mass needed to deal with such aspects of combined impacts and their consequences. Risk assessments in ALARM will be hierarchical and examine a range of organisational (genes, species, ecosystems), temporal (seasonal, annual, decadal) and spatial scales (habitat, region, continent) determined by the appropriate resolution of current case studies and databases. Socio-economics is a cross-cutting theme that will contribute to the integration of driver-specific risk assessment methods, develop instruments to communicate risks to biodiversity end users and, will indicate policy options to mitigate such risks. The ALARM consortium is co-ordinated by the Helmholtz-Centre UFZ - Centre for Environmental Research Leipzig-Halle. It combines the expertise of 54 partners from 26 countries (19 EU, Romania, Bulgaria, Israel, Switzerland, Russia, Chile and Argentina). ALARM encompasses 7 small or medium sized enterprises (SMEs) as full partners with central responsibilities and with a share of >10% of the project resources.