The global scientific community is taking steps toward a nexus approach to address interlinkages across biodiversity and climate systems, yet synergistic research and policymaking remains limited. This gap is manifest in the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSP) framework, which is applied in various sectors to make sense of future complexity but excludes consideration of biodiversity and nature. As a result, the SSP narratives disregard feedbacks between socio-economic and environmental systems, potentially limiting options to address both the biodiversity and climate crises simultaneously and masking the need to build resilience to concurrent and cascading risks. In this paper, we explore this gap through a co-creation process at the European scale by enriching the original European-SSPs with considerations of biodiversity and nature using a nexus approach (i.e., interactions across biodiversity, energy, food, health, water, and transport). We investigate the implications through a systems analysis of the original and enriched European-SSP narratives. Our findings show that introducing consideration of biodiversity altered the system dynamics within the European-SSP narratives considerably, with outcomes for biodiversity ranging widely within and across scenarios. Further, the relative significance of indirect drivers changed across SSPs due to novel feedbacks with biodiversity and other sectors. Our findings have important implications for biodiversity governance, highlighting the need for adaptive approaches that respond to emergent socio-economic conditions and systemic policymaking that situates technical interventions within enabling governance contexts. The resulting narratives offer more ‘biodiversity-centric’ scenarios to the climate research community, demonstrating how scenario frameworks can be enriched to facilitate synergistic research and policymaking.