Long-term global scenarios have underpinned research and assessment of global environmental change for four decades. Over the past ten years, the climate change research community has developed a scenario framework combining alternative futures of climate and society to facilitate integrated research and consistent assessment to inform policy. Here we assess how well this framework is working and what challenges it faces. We synthesize insights from scenario-based literature, community discussions and recent experience in assessments, concluding that the framework has been widely adopted across research communities and is largely meeting immediate needs. However, some mixed successes and a changing policy and research landscape present key challenges, and we recommend several new directions for the development and use of this framework.

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Achievements and needs for the climate change scenario framework.

Effective policies to halt biodiversity loss require knowing which anthropogenic drivers are the most important direct causes. Whereas previous knowledge has been limited in scope and rigor, here we statistically synthesize empirical comparisons of recent driver impacts found through a wide-ranging review. We show that land/sea use change has been the dominant direct driver of recent biodiversity loss worldwide. Direct exploitation of natural resources ranks second and pollution third; climate change and invasive alien species have been significantly less important than the top two drivers. The oceans, where direct exploitation and climate change dominate, have a different driver hierarchy from land and fresh water. It also varies among types of biodiversity indicators. For example, climate change is a more important driver of community composition change than of changes in species populations. Stopping global biodiversity loss requires policies and actions to tackle all the major drivers and their interactions, not some of them in isolation.

The direct drivers of recent global anthropogenic biodiversity loss

https://research.bangor.ac.uk/portal/files/27515327/2020Mapping_the_Continuumof_Humanity_s_Footprint_on_Land.pdf

Challenges in producing policy-relevant global scenarios of biodiversity and ecosystem services

There is an urgent need to protect key areas for biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people (NCP). However, different values of nature are rarely considered together in conservation planning. Here, we explore potential priority areas in Europe for biodiversity (all terrestrial vertebrates) and a set of cultural and regulating NCP while considering demand for these NCP. We quantify the spatial overlap between these priorities and their performance in representing different values of nature. We show that different priorities rarely coincide, except in certain irreplaceable ecosystems. Notably, priorities for biodiversity better represent NCP than the reverse. Theoretically, protecting an extra 5% of land has the potential to double conservation gains for biodiversity while also maintaining some essential NCP, leading to co-benefits for both nature and people.

Balancing conservation priorities for nature and for people in Europe

The unpredictable Anthropocene poses the challenge of imagining a radically different, equitable and sustainable world. Looking 100 years ahead is not easy, and especially as millennials, it appear...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/26395916.2020.1821095

The voices of youth in envisioning positive futures for nature and people

Scientists have repeatedly argued that transformative, multiscale global scenarios are needed as tools in the quest to halt the decline of biodiversity and achieve sustainability goals. As a first step towards achieving this, the researchers who participated in the scenarios and models expert group of the Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) entered into an iterative, participatory process that led to the development of the Nature Futures Framework (NFF). The NFF is a heuristic tool that captures diverse, positive relationships of humans with nature in the form of a triangle. It can be used both as a boundary object for continuously opening up more plural perspectives in the creation of desirable nature scenarios and as an actionable framework for developing consistent nature scenarios across multiple scales. Here we describe the methods employed to develop the NFF and how it fits into a longer term process to create transformative, multiscale scenarios for nature. We argue that the contribution of the NFF is twofold: (a) its ability to hold a plurality of perspectives on what is desirable, which enables the development of joint goals and visions and recognizes the possible convergence and synergies of measures to achieve these visions and (b), its multiscale functionality for elaborating scenarios and models that can inform decision‐making at relevant levels, making it applicable across specific places and perspectives on nature. If humanity is to achieve its goal of a more sustainable and prosperous future rooted in a flourishing nature, it is critical to open up a space for more plural perspectives of human–nature relationships. As the global community sets out to develop new goals for biodiversity, the NFF can be used as a navigation tool helping to make diverse, desirable futures possible

Developing multiscale and integrative nature–people scenarios using the Nature Futures Framework

Report on the Workshop ‘Next Steps in Developing Nature Futures’ : Meeting of the expert group on Scenarios and Models of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, June 2018, the Hague, the Netherlands

Grigoriy Kolomytsev

Papers

Developing multiscale and integrative nature–people scenarios using the Nature Futures Framework

Report on the Workshop ‘Next Steps in Developing Nature Futures’ : Meeting of the expert group on Scenarios and Models of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, June 2018, the Hague, the Netherlands