The COVID‐19 pandemic, its impact on the global economy, and current delays in the negotiation of the post‐2020 global biodiversity agenda of the Convention on Biological Diversity heighten the ...urgency to build back better for biodiversity, sustainability, and well‐being. In 2019, the Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) concluded that addressing biodiversity loss requires a transformative change of the global economic system. Drawing on the IPBES findings, this policy perspective discusses actions in four priority areas to inform the post‐2020 agenda: (1) Increasing funding for conservation; (2) redirecting incentives for sustainability; (3) creating an enabling regulatory environment; and (4) reforming metrics to assess biodiversity impacts and progress toward sustainable and just goals. As the COVID‐19 pandemic has made clear, and the negotiations for the post‐2020 agenda have emphasized, governments are indispensable in guiding economic systems and must take an active role in transformations, along with businesses and civil society. These key actors must work together to implement actions that combine short‐term impacts with structural change to shift economic systems away from a fixation with growth toward human and ecological well‐being. The four priority areas discussed here provide opportunities for the post‐2020 agenda to do so.
•Farmers are generally aware of the most obvious expressions of biodiversity (diverse species and varied landscape).•Biodiversity is often considered by farmers to represent the complexity of ...ecological systems.•Social and economic values of biodiversity are equally important but are often contradictory.•Organic and conventional farmers considered biodiversity in very different ways.•Soft policy tools could also foster biodiversity sensitive farming in addition to existing monetary incentives.
In agricultural landscapes farmers have a large impact on biodiversity through the management decisions they apply to their land. Farmers’ perceptions of biodiversity and its different values influence their willingness to apply biodiversity friendly farming practices. The results of a discourse-based, deliberative biodiversity valuation are presented in this paper. Organic and conventional farmers’ perceptions of the different values of biodiversity were analyzed across three European countries. Focus group methodology was used to explore how farmers perceive biodiversity and how they assess its values.
Our results suggest that farmers’ perceptions of biodiversity are strongly embedded in their everyday lives and linked to farming practices. Besides recognizing the importance of species and habitat diversity, farmers also acknowledge wider landscape processes and attach value to the complexity of ecological systems. Organic farmers tended to have a more complex and philosophical approach to biodiversity and they were relatively homogeneous in this aspect, while conventional farmers showed larger heterogeneity. Ethical and social values were important for all farmers. Economic value was more dominant in the conventional focus groups.
The discourse based deliberative valuation method is worth applying in relation to biodiversity for two reasons. First, this method is able to reflect the heterogeneity of non-scientist participants and the context in which they are embedded, which both have a great impact on the results of the valuation. Second, deliberation upon the importance of biodiversity makes possible to understand the competing perceptions of biodiversity and to include different value aspects in the valuation process. The policy oriented consequence of the research can be drawn from the observation that farmers have a strong acknowledgement of ethical and social biodiversity values. This suggests that soft policy tools could also foster biodiversity sensitive farming methods, complementary to mainstream monetary incentives.
The machining of natural rocks is gaining ground in art and architecture. However, the parameters influencing the design of surfaces with low surface roughness values are still the subject of ...research. In this study, we analysed the composition of granite specimens to examine their effect on surface roughness. 5 different granite samples were milled and then examined with XRD equipment. Minerals on the surface were analysed by light microscopy and scanning electron microscopy. Then the surface area of the minerals was measured with a 3D imaging system for surface roughness. Based on the obtained results, we examined the amount of constituents of each mineral and the value of the surface roughness of the minerals. The results showed that changes in certain mineral constituents affect the value of surface roughness during machining. By this, the expected surface roughness value of the rocks can be predicted based on the composition.
Well-managed legume-based food systems are uniquely positioned to curtail the existential challenge posed by climate change through the significant contribution that legumes can make toward limiting ...Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. This potential is enabled by the specific functional attributes offered only by legumes, which deliver multiple co-benefits through improved ecosystem functions, including reduced farmland biodiversity loss, and better human-health and -nutrition provisioning. These three critical societal challenges are referred to collectively here as the “
climate-biodiversity-nutrition nexus
.” Despite the unparalleled potential of the provisions offered by legumes, this diverse crop group remains characterized as underutilized throughout Europe, and in many regions world-wide. This commentary highlights that integrated, diverse, legume-based, regenerative agricultural practices should be allied with more-concerted action on ex-farm gate factors at appropriate bioregional scales. Also, that this can be achieved whilst optimizing production, safeguarding food-security, and minimizing additional land-use requirements. To help avoid forfeiting the benefits of legume cultivation for system function, a specific and practical methodological and decision-aid framework is offered. This is based upon the identification and management of sustainable-development indicators for legume-based value chains, to help manage the key facilitative capacities and dependencies. Solving the wicked problems of the climate-biodiversity-nutrition nexus demands complex solutions and multiple benefits and this legume-focus must be allied with more-concerted policy action, including improved facilitation of the catalytic provisions provided by collaborative capacity builders—to ensure that the knowledge networks are established, that there is unhindered information flow, and that new transformative value-chain capacities and business models are established.
Abstract
To support legitimate European Union (EU) biodiversity policy development, there is a growing momentum to engage society in these policy processes and build meaningful and inclusive dialogue ...between science, policy, and society in policy deliberation. So far, engagement efforts have been made to encourage citizen participation in knowledge production via, for example, citizen science. At EU level means to encourage public participation have included a variety of online mechanisms for spreading information and promoting public deliberation. Despite these developments, the involvement of the general public in policy-making at the EU level has been rather inconsistent to date. In this article, we evaluate online science cafés as potential means to encourage dialogue between science, policy, and society; we ask what elements in their design and implementation are essential for inclusive dialogue between science, policy, and society. Our findings emphasise iterative dialogue when approaching multi-scalar challenges. This has important implications for developing legitimate participation across Europe.
While there is much debate on transformative change among academics and policymakers, the discussion on how to govern such change is still in its infancy. This article argues that transformative ...governance is needed to enable the transformative change necessary for achieving global sustainability goals. Based on a literature review, the article unpacks this concept of transformative governance. It is: integrative, to ensure local solutions also have sustainable impacts elsewhere (across scales, places, issues and sectors); inclusive, to empower those whose interests are currently not being met and represent values embodying transformative change for sustainability; adaptive, enabling learning, experimentation, and reflexivity, to cope with the complexity of transformative change; and pluralist, recognizing different knowledge systems. We argue that only when these four governance approaches are: implemented in conjunction; operationalized in a specific manner; and focused on addressing the indirect drivers underlying sustainability issues, governance becomes transformative.
•Nature and its contributions to people’s quality of life are associated with a wide diversity of values.•IPBES embraces this diversity of values, as well as the need to integrate and bridge them in ...its assessments.•Uncovering the values of nature’s contributions to people (NCP) can bridge notions of nature and a good quality of life.•Transformation towards sustainability requires addressing power relations among different perspectives on the values of NCP.•Intrinsic, instrumental and relational values need to be acknowledged and promoted.
Nature is perceived and valued in starkly different and often conflicting ways. This paper presents the rationale for the inclusive valuation of nature’s contributions to people (NCP) in decision making, as well as broad methodological steps for doing so. While developed within the context of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), this approach is more widely applicable to initiatives at the knowledge–policy interface, which require a pluralistic approach to recognizing the diversity of values. We argue that transformative practices aiming at sustainable futures would benefit from embracing such diversity, which require recognizing and addressing power relationships across stakeholder groups that hold different values on human nature-relations and NCP.
The number of collaborative initiatives between scientists and volunteers (i.e., citizen science) is increasing across many research fields. The promise of societal transformation together with ...scientific breakthroughs contributes to the current popularity of citizen science (CS) in the policy domain. We examined the transformative capacity of citizen science in particular learning through environmental CS as conservation tool. We reviewed the CS and social-learning literature and examined 14 conservation projects across Europe that involved collaborative CS. We also developed a template that can be used to explore learning arrangements (i.e., learning events and materials) in CS projects and to explain how the desired outcomes can be achieved through CS learning. We found that recent studies aiming to define CS for analytical purposes often fail to improve the conceptual clarity of CS; CS programs may have transformative potential, especially for the development of individual skills, but such transformation is not necessarily occurring at the organizational and institutional levels; empirical evidence on simple learning outcomes, but the assertion of transformative effects of CS learning is often based on assumptions rather than empirical observation; and it is unanimous that learning in CS is considered important, but in practice it often goes unreported or unevaluated. In conclusion, we point to the need for reliable and transparent measurement of transformative effects for democratization of knowledge production. El número de iniciativas colaborativas entre los científicos y los voluntarios (es decir, ciencia ciudadana) está incrementando en muchas áreas de investigación. La promesa de una transformación social junto con avances científicos contribuye a la popularidad actual de la ciencia ciudadana (CC) en el dominio político. Examinamos la capacidad transformativa de la ciencia ciudadana, en particular del aprendizaje por medio de CC ambiental como herramienta de conservación. Revisamos la literatura sobre CC y aprendizaje social y examinamos 14 proyectos de conservación en Europa que involucraban CC colaborativa. También desarrollamos un patrón que puede usarse para explorar los arreglos de aprendizaje (es decir, los materiales y eventos de aprendizaje) en los proyectos de CC y para explicar cómo los desarrollos deseados pueden obtenerse mediante el aprendizaje de CC. Encontramos que los estudios recientes que buscan definir a la CC por propósitos analíticos fallan continuamente en la mejora de la claridad conceptual de la CC; que los programas de CC pueden tener potencial transformativo, especialmente para el desarrollo de las habilidades individuales, pero dicha transformación no está ocurriendo necesariamente en los niveles institucionales y de organización; que existe evidencia empírica de los resultados simples de aprendizaje, pero la aseveración de los efectos transformativos del aprendizaje de CC está basada continuamente en suposiciones en lugar de observaciones empíricas; y que es unánime que el aprendizaje en la CC está considerado como importante, pero en la práctica continuamente sigue sin ser reportado o evaluado. En conclusión, señalamos la necesidad de una medida confiable y transparente de los efectos transformadores para la democratización de la producción del conocimiento.
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