IPBES outlines system-wide social, economic and technological shifts needed to address the root drivers of global biodiversity loss.
By Salam Rajesh
What are transformative changes, and how do they relate to current approaches to managing biodiversity, ecosystem services, and nature’s contributions to people, and how do transformative changes link to the relationship between the underlying causes and the direct drivers responsible for causing biodiversity loss and degradation?
These are the underlying thoughts of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)’s Global Assessment of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services outlining its 2050 Vision for Biodiversity.
The move comes as vital in the discourse of declining ecosystems and biodiversity loss globally due to several factors including anthropogenic influences in the most negative ways, climate change implications, and extreme weather events amongst other reasons.
IPBES defines transformative change as ‘a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values, needed for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, long-term human wellbeing and sustainable development’.
The IPBES Global Assessment of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services noted that there are pathways for achieving the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity in conjunction with key human development goals.
The pathways require fundamental changes in development paradigms and social-ecological dynamics, which in turn entail changes in society, considering inequality and governance, employing conservation, restoration and the sustainable use of land, water, energy and materials, and appropriately modifying production and consumption habits, food systems, and global value chains according to the Vision document.
The IPBES assessment seeks in informing decision-makers on options to implement transformative changes in order to achieve the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity and the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations.
The assessment further aims at identifying and providing understanding of factors at various scales in human society, at both the individual and collective levels, and from local to global, that can be leveraged to bring about transformative changes to help achieve the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity.
These factors span psychological, behavioral, social, cultural, economic, political, governance, institutional, demographic, scientific, technical and technological dimensions, corresponding to the indirect drivers of change in biodiversity.
Among many scales to achieve the goals, the vision document takes into account values (intrinsic, relational, instrumental) and how they influence behavior. It would also look into how the values differ between regions and sub-regions, and between various levels of development.
This project in building upon and complementing the IPBES assessment on values, that is, the methodological assessment regarding the diverse conceptualization of multiple values of nature and its benefits, including biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Once finalized, the vision document would inspire notions of good quality of life, worldviews and cultures, models of interaction between nature and people, and social narratives, and the role of governance systems, of norms and regulations, of education and communication, of economic and non-economic incentives, and of financial and other institutions in leveraging behavioral change in individuals, businesses, communities and societies.
It would further promote the role of technologies and of the assessment of technologies, the role of individuals and collective action, the role of concepts and tools coming from studies of complex systems, and of transformation and transitions theory.
Importantly, it would seek in overcoming the obstacles in achieving transformative change, and in achieving equity and the need for “just transitions”, including gender aspects.
In this deliberation, the vision document ponders on the crucial question of what is the relationship between transformative change and transitional changes, and what is needed to make sure that transformative change ensures ‘just transitions’.
This inherently runs parallel to the concern on what enables and accelerates transformative change toward sustainable futures, and what can policymakers, decision-makers, managers, stakeholders, scientists, citizens, businesses and organizations do in practice to further transformative change to meet relevant local, national and international goals in an equitable, just and participatory manner – leaving no one behind, as the UN would say.
This further translates to the question of which obstacles and challenges impede transformative change toward a sustainable world, how might they change over time, scale and context, and how can they be overcome.
The vision document explores how to address, in the context of transformative change, the direct and indirect drivers of biodiversity loss and nature deterioration, including climate change and development and environmental inequities, and how to reverse biodiversity loss and restore and safeguard nature and its contributions to people.
To overcome the challenges, the document suggests focusing on the impacts of production and consumption systems, resource use and extraction, trade and financial flows, pollution, legacies of colonialism, and of human population dynamics and social practices related to nature and the resultant distribution of material and non-material benefits, degradation of nature and vulnerabilities across global societies and scales.
The IPBES document seeks in assessing how transformative change for nature and people presents specific challenges as it involves the consideration of science-based and indigenous and local knowledge-based understandings of biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people, together with normative ethics, different worldviews and collective values about visions of a sustainable future.
The document would further assess examples of good practices, applicable and accessible knowledge and technologies, and invoke narratives, stories, media, scenarios and visualizations at various scales that illustrate visions of a sustainable world which might provide potential scenarios and pathways for transformative change based on different worldviews.
The IPBES vision document to a 2045 roadmap to achieve biodiversity loss recovery globally reflects the ongoing assessments at various levels of species decline amidst extensive biodiversity loss induced by factors ranging from large scale commercial ventures that eat into pristine natural landscapes, and implications of the three planetary crises – global warming, climate change and extreme weather events.