Imagination on Transformative Future Biodiversity

The world has changed. Posited to be a ‘super year’ for biodiversity with various international meetings and the conclusion of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s ten-year Aichi Targets, 2020 will be remembered for very different reasons: catastrophic fires, the COVID-19 pandemic, floods, locust outbreaks, a drastic drop in oil prices and widespread food insecurity. These disruptions will increase the already considerable gap between rich and poor, hitting marginalized groups - the impoverished, women, Indigenous communities and people of color - much harder. Impacts on the environment have been mixed: carbon emissions may be down, but there are growing concerns that nature will be forgotten in the rush to rebuild devastated economies.

-- Carina Wyborn, Australian National University, Australia.

The biodiversity community from the researchers, citizens, local knowledge holders, practitioners and decision makers concerned with the natural world and its relationship with people are scrambling to use this opportunity to create blossoming futures for people and nature [1]. As fodder for the conversations, strategies, research plans and decisions that are unfolding, the researchers have offered three possible futures that characterize ongoing debates within the biodiversity community, which was reported in Nature Sustainability on August (2020).

Dr. C. Wyborn et al., have discussed some of the following important features such as basic needs, wildlife rules and climate first on biodiversity. 

Basic needs: Enjoying coffee and locally sourced breakfast cooked in a communal kitchen, you watch the news streamed through a vid-cast. Luckily, your rations arrived yesterday, so you have fresh coffee for the first time in weeks. After widespread popular revolts in 2021, equality and social welfare are now prioritized by national governments. Many countries turned inwards, focusing on producing food for their citizens. With less consumption, trade and travel, carbon emissions flat-lined. You wonder what could have been possible if there was more money available for research and innovation. Basic needs are being met and society seems to be adjusting the life within limits.

Figure 1. The imagination of future biodiversity [1].

Wildlife rules: You wake up and open a bag of lab-engineered coffee and rip open a box of fortified breakfast cereal from climate controlled farms. The local desalination plant ensures a constant supply of food despite ongoing droughts in your region. As priorities shifted from climate action, emissions growth continued. This means that while militarized conservation protects species locally, climate-sensitive species are now found only in climate-controlled enclosures in zoos. The Arctic is ice-free in the summer and the polar bears are gone. More people are employed inprotecting species rather than hunting and harvesting them for food and trade, but society as a whole is disconnected from nature.

Climate first: Your unity BCI (Brain Computer Implant) projects drone footage from the Radical Climate Action Alliance: deserts covered with solar farms; oceans with wind farms; and farmed land covered with biofuel crops. The Alliance are successfully advocated for environmental and human rights treaties to be revoked in 2021 in favor of a climate first charter that prioritizes storing carbon and generating clean energy. You feel a sense of pride at a nuclear reactor displaying your national flag and consider how corporations have benefited from green energy partnerships while inequality has risen.

Whose future?: These worlds are allegories that capture major features of a two-year dialogue - under the banner biodiversity revisited - involving almost 300 experts from across the world, at different stages of their career and with a diversity of backgrounds. The initiative has generated a transdisciplinary agenda that calls for research to mobilize plural knowledge, ethics and actions to sustain diverse and just futures for life on Earth [2]. These stories take place in the future, but the values and motivations that underpin them exist in the present. We have imagined how they may play out to stimulate more creative ways of considering the trade-offs and consequences of current choices, decisions and actions.

The biodiversity community needs to move beyond the technocratic approaches that currently dominate ways of thinking about the future [3]. These approaches are often built on outdated assumptions that often do not reflect diverse knowledge and perspectives about biodiversity values. This matters because projections of the future both represent and create trajectories of change by shaping how problems are understood and communicated, and therefore which strategies are developed to address them [4]. This means that researchers have to acknowledge that imagining the future, whether in a model or a story, is political [5].

Imagination in the Anthropocene: Some of the imaginations on anthropocene reported in different journals. Imagination is critical to sustainable and just futures for life on Earth [3]. Writing after the West African Ebola outbreak, Professor Michael Osterholm and colleagues called for more “creative imagination” to consider future pandemic scenarios [6]. This feels particularly salient five years on. Purely technocratic approaches fail to engage with the emotions that motivate action towards alternative futures: fear, hope, grief and agency [3]. By building new ways of thinking about longstanding problems, inclusive and creative processes can generate positive stories about the future in ways that are empowering [3]. Imagining the future can drive societies towards change by shaping common practices, aspirations and institutions [7].

These anticipatory capacities start with asking: what are the short- and long-term drivers of change? What values should be maintained into the future? What can be done differently over the next five years? Over the next 30 years? What do we need to know and what will we never know? How can options be created and traps avoided? What are the ethical implications of action and inaction? Considering these types of questions can provide a foundation for decision making despite uncertainty. 

Imagination can help the biodiversity community grapple with these challenges by embracing diverse ways of thinking, listening, being and knowing. Diversity can be the foundation of more just and sustainable futures for life on Earth.

The purpose of this article content (taken by our SNB team) is to create awareness and development the future scenarios of biodiversity for the twenty-first century in these above 5 topics, in freshwater ecosystems and green world based on global scenarios of changes in the environment and the understanding by ecological experts of the sensitivity to these global changes.

References

1. Carina Wyborn, et al., Nature Sustainability, 3, 670 (2020).
2. C. Wyborn, et al., (ResearchGate, 2020); https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.12086.52804/2
3. L. Pereira, et al., Elem. Sci. Anth. 7, 35 (2019).
4. S. Veland,et al.,Curr. Opin. Environ. Sustain. 31, 41 (2018).
5. C. Granjou, et al., J. F. Futures 92, 5 (2017).
6. M. T. Osterholm, et al., JAMA Intern. Med. 175, 7 (2015).
7. A. C. Mangnus, et al., Ecol. Soc. 24, 2 (2019).
8. S. Jasanof, Nature, 450, 33 (2007).

Blog Written By

Dr. S. Thirumurugan

Assistant Professor

National College, Tiruchirappalli

Tamil Nadu, India

Editors

Dr. A. S. Ganeshraja

Dr. S. Chandrasekar

Dr. K. Rajkumar

Reviewers

Dr. Y. Sasikumar

Dr. K. Vaithinathan