Exploring long-term biodiversity futures in Europe: Using the future to inform policy and decision making today | Policy Brief 4

Introduction

Biodiversity underpins a healthy, resilient planet that supports both people and nature. Yet, escalating human pressures are driving biodiversity loss and accelerating species extinction. These changes pose a direct and growing threat to human wellbeing, contributing to an increased risk of infectious pathogen emergence, food insecurity and reduced nutritional diversity.  Climate change further amplifies ecosystem disruption and introduces new risks, including mortality and infrastructure damage from extreme weather events and population displacement from sea level rise. These impacts fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable communities and risk deepening inequalities.  

 Recent assessments from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services highlight two key messages. First, halting and reversing the biodiversity crisis requires transformative change, moving beyond incremental fixes toward fundamental, system-wide shifts in views, structures and practices that enable sustainable futures. Second, the biodiversity crisis cannot be addressed in isolation. Nexus approaches are required to understand interdependencies between biodiversity and other crises and sectors, revealing co-benefits, anticipating trade-offs and supporting more efficient and synergistic policy design.  

Shared visions and scenarios of potential futures can leverage these findings to anticipate future risks to biodiversity and inspire policy design. Exploratory scenarios characterise what could happen, illustrating risks to biodiversity under different societal futures. These approaches can be used to identify the most influential drivers and interactions shaping future outcomes and support policy design that is robust to future uncertainty. In contrast, target-seeking scenarios  focus on what we want to happen by envisioning desirable futures and generating pathways of transformative action that mitigate biodiversity loss.  

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Lazurko  Anita 1), Harrison Paula 1), Heiskanen Anna-Stiina 2), Ronkainen Jukka-Pekka 2) 

1) UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), 2) Finnish Environment Institute (Syke)

Publisher: Finnish Environment Institute (Syke) 

 https://doi.org/10.58013/dv1f-rs76‍    ‍