Highlights and images for 18 December 2024

The final act of the 11th plenary session of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) was the media launch of a unique assessment: the thematic assessment on the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, determinants of transformative change, and options for achieving the 2050 vision for biodiversity (Transformative Change Assessment). The successful approval of the Transformative Change Assessment marks the first time that an intergovernmental body represented by all regions has tackled so directly the question of how human-nature relations are shaped by power asymmetries in dominant economic and financial paradigms, bringing in the rapidly-expanding knowledge base from social sciences and the humanities.

Moderated by Rob Spaull, IPBES Head of Communications, the media launch brought together IPBES Executive Secretary Anne Larigauderie, IPBES Chair David Obura, and the assessment Co-Chairs Karen O’Brien (Norway), Lucas Garibaldi (Argentina), and Arun Agrawal (US) to deliver the Transformative Change Assessment’s key messages and explain why transformative change is vital, urgent, and deeply necessary.

IPBES Executive Secretary Anne Larigauderie offered a reminder of one of the main conclusions of the first Global Assessment on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, released in 2019, that the world was not on a path to reach the Sustainable Development Goals and that urgent efforts fostering transformative change were necessary to put us on a new path. She emphasized that the way people view nature and what informs their decisions are fundamental for the necessary shifts to reverse biodiversity loss.

Co-Chair O’Brien provided an overview of the Assessment’s process, including the group of experts. She outlined the Assessment’s structure and focused on the key principles for transformative change: equity and justice; pluralism and inclusions; respectful and reciprocal human-nature relationships; and adaptive learning and action. She further highlighted the five overarching challenges:

• relations of domination over nature and people;
• economic and political inequalities;
• inadequate policies and unfit institutions;
• unsustainable consumption and production patterns; and
• limited access to clean technologies and uncoordinated knowledge and innovation systems.

Co-Chair Garibaldi focused on strategies and actions for transformative change. He emphasized that conservation that involves sustainable stewardship, notably by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, contributes to transformative change when it is inclusive, well resourced, focused on places of high value to nature and people, and when the rights of Indigenous Peoples are recognized. He further noted that transformative change in sectors that heavily contribute to biodiversity loss is crucial and urgent for advancing sustainable development globally. He concluded stressing the need for inclusive, accountable, and adaptive governance systems, underscoring that shifting dominant societal views and values to recognize and prioritize human-nature interconnectedness is a powerful strategy.

Co-Chair Agrawal stressed that shared positive visions and their development is especially important to recognize socio-ecological interdependencies, the agency of non-human life forms, and ethics of care, and thereby inspire transformative change. He noted that transformative change is system-wide, requiring a whole-of-society and whole-of-government approach that engages all actors and sectors in visioning and contributing collaboratively to transformative change. He highlighted governments as powerful enablers of transformative change when they foster policy coherence and enforce stronger regulations to benefit nature, and emphasized that protecting civil society initiatives and environmental defenders supports transformative change. He concluded outlining take-home messages that transformative change for an equitable and sustainable world:

• addresses underlying causes of biodiversity loss;
• involves principled strategies and actions;
• achieves positive and measurable results; and
• requires as an enabler a leading role by governments.

IPBES Chair Obura acknowledged all the contributors to this complex work in the IPBES family. He noted that the Nexus and Transformative Change Assessments apply to everybody on the planet, including national governments, local jurisdictions, and communities, stressing the need to link across these scales. He looked forward to media coverage distilling these difficult messages, urging not to oversimplify the challenges ahead. He underscored that the Assessment brings forth tough messages on power relationships and the need to change the status quo, concluding that, regarding dissemination, real work starts now.

The ensuing discussion focused on: unlocking opportunities, including for businesses, through transformative change; the role the Assessment will play in international policymaking for biodiversity; ways to universalize Indigenous and local knowledge to solve global problems given that it often is context-specific; ways to ensure that national governments act upon the Assessment’s key messages; interlinkages between the Transformative Change and the Nexus Assessments; how the 100 different visions included in the Assessment had been sourced; how difficult it was to reach consensus over concepts of colonialism and predominance over nature; ways to combine the different priorities and capacities of high- and low-income countries in a world of fragmentation and inequality; and specific visions for what happens next.