Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability最新文献

Achieving the intertwined goals of justice and sustainability requires transformative changes to meaningfully engage diverse perspectives. Therefore, scholars and policymakers need new ways of recognising and addressing nature’s multiple values across cultures, disciplines and other knowledge traditions. By reviewing academic publications, policy documents and Indigenous and local community sources, we developed an inclusive typology of nature’s values to clarify value concepts and guide their consideration in decisions. Through case studies, we illustrate how navigating ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ interactions within and across this typology can help confront plural-value challenges, such as enhancing inclusive participation in environmental research and practice, and effective management of socio-environmental conflicts. We conclude by exploring how this typology of values can further leverage transformative change in other decision-making contexts.

The Values Assessment (VA) of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services shows that while a wide range of valuation methods exist to include nature's values in diverse decision-making contexts, uptake of these methods remains limited. Building on the VA, this paper reviews five critical steps in the evaluation of project or policy proposals that can improve the inclusion of nature’s values in decisions. Furthermore, improving valuation practice requires guidelines that utilise quality criteria for valuation of nature and ensure a balance between them. This paper proposes three such quality criteria: relevance, robustness and resource efficiency. The paper argues that the five steps and three Rs can generate a practical checklist to support commissioning, evaluation and performance of more plural valuations. Such guidelines can provide the next steps needed to improve uptake of nature valuation in decision-making.

Addressing the nature crisis requires systemic transformations in society, especially regarding what and how political and economic decisions are made, and understanding how we take everyday decisions that affect our relations towards nature. Underpinning transformational change towards more just and sustainable futures thus requires assessing the role that nature’s values play in decision-making across scales and how valuation methods and approaches can best guide decisions. Given the diversity of the values of nature, it is key to map out what those values look like, and how they are formed and evolve over time in relation to institutions (i.e. society’s conventions, norms and rules). This special issue draws on the IPBES Values Assessment published in 2022 and engages with key questions about the role of values and valuation of nature for transformative change towards more just and sustainable futures. The special issue presents papers that review topics about how to conceptualise value diversity and undertake valuation to guide decisions geared towards transformative change. It also focuses on how power, justice and socio-environmental conflicts intersect with nature’s values, and the role of diverse values in conservation and development policy instruments.

The potential for Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs to integrate nature’s diverse values into decision-making, and thereby support broader transformative change, is of increasing research interest. We analyze published reviews and case studies of PES from the IPBES Values Assessment to evaluate 1) how diverse values were (or were not) articulated through PES programs, 2) what implications these inclusion or exclusion processes had for program evolution and outcomes, and 3) whether these outcomes support broader processes of transformative change. We find that integrating diverse values, combined with substantive decision-making by local communities, can strengthen social and environmental outcomes. However, evidence of factors that shape transformative changes from PES programs is still scarce and thus provides a fertile and much-needed avenue for further research.

As countries consider new area-based conservation targets under the Convention on Biological Diversity, protected areas (PAs) and their impacts on people and nature are coming under increasing scrutiny. We review the evidence base on PA impacts, combining the findings from existing rigorous impact evaluations with local case studies developed for this study. We identify characteristics of PA establishment and management that improve the sustainability of biodiversity conservation and justice for local communities. We find that recognizing and respecting local values and knowledge about natural resource stewardship, colearning, and comanagement are key to achieving positive impacts for nature and people. Transforming PA governance toward more inclusive conservation depends upon the ability of PAs to be designed and implemented around the values and needs of local people.

Despite recent advances in global climate finance architecture, the amount of funds available for risk reduction and build resilience in the world’s most vulnerable countries is still insufficient. There is an urgent need to overhaul the climate and disaster risk finance landscape in order to safeguard the most vulnerable people in the world from growing loss and damage from climate change and reduce the climate finance gap. Theories, data, and conceptual frameworks for operationalizing such transformative changes are currently still developing. Based on the analysis of existing evidence on transformative climate finance landscape, this paper makes the case that, in order to achieve climate-resilient development, we need to fully integrate transformative disaster risk finance approaches into the broader climate finance debate that addresses not only mitigation concerns, but also caters to the financial needs building resilience of both people and nature.

Aiming at just and sustainable futures for biodiversity conservation requires clarity concerning how justice relates to the diverse values of nature. By drawing upon and expanding on the recent Values Assessment of Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, this article discusses the implications of the diverse values of nature for different dimensions of justice. It also addresses how achieving transformative change that protects biodiversity requires the inclusion of diverse values of nature into valuation and decision-making processes, and how this imperative is interconnected with different dimensions of justice.

Values held in agricultural extension systems determine which extension goals can be reached. Globally changing socio-ecological contexts require a paradigm shift in agricultural extension systems from a top-down approach dominated by instrumental values to achieve the primary goal of increasing yields, to a more site-specific relational and participatory approach that induces locally adaptive use of sustainable agricultural practices. A literature review was conducted to understand how relational values in farmer-to-farmer extension align with participatory agricultural extension systems. Relevance, trust, and place attachment are the main relational values expressed in farmer-to-farmer extension where participatory processes incorporate farmers' livelihood outcomes in the transformational goals of agricultural extension. Recognizing and strengthening the relational values in farmer-to-farmer extension, based on different contexts, will likely support the development of locally adapted knowledge and innovations, and provide a basic rationale for building communication strategies, colearning, and supporting behavioral change of all agricultural extension actors.