Reversing Biodiversity Loss –
Conflicts, Telecoupling and Successful Practices

Pressures on natural resource extraction particularly from Asia, North America and Europe culminate in the destruction of highly valuable and very rare ecosystems with huge impacts on biodiversity and climate regulation, as well on the living conditions, cultural heritages and rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLC). Inherited knowledge on how to sustainably manage such ecosystems and protect biodiversity as a basis of life are destroyed through conflicts and will lead to unpredictable losses in sustainable management capacities for vulnerable social-ecological systems.

The research on impacts of conflicts and crises on long-term biodiversity trends is not yet established. A challenge for the future will be to monitor the combined impacts on people and nature from an inter- and multidisciplinary perspective. Uprooted people, unguided land use and lost knowledge on how to sustainably manage nature are – next to climate change – the most important threats for the future of biodiversity.

Speakers:

• Zsolt Molnár (Centre for Ecological Research, Hungary) –
  „The role of traditional and local knowledge in resolving and avoiding conflicts around biodiversity
  conservation“
• Harini Nagendra (Azim Premji University, India) –
  „Connecting people and nature in Global South cities: Challenges and opportunities for nature-based
  solutions“

Is it realistic and will it be sufficient to protect 30% (as proposed by COP 15) or even 50% (as proposed by E.O. Wilson) of the Earth’s land and water areas (land-sparing approach) to stop biodiversity loss? Or do we need to use the remaining 70% (or 50%) of areas more sustainably and nature friendly (land-sharing approach)?

In the fight to preserve biodiversity, land-sparing and land-sharing concepts are often discussed as alternatives. In reality, however, a combination of both will be needed, as it is not only about preserving wilderness but also about protecting valuable cultivated landscapes and synanthropic species. What is needed for all the different habitats on earth is not only protected areas, but also wilderness-friendly landsharing concepts. In this session, we will hear two talks and a discussion on these approaches and find out how synergies between land-sparing and land-sharing strategies can succeed in different habitats.

Speakers:

• Teja Tscharntke (University of Göttingen, Germany) – „Mixing land sparing with land sharing“
• Markus Fischer (University of Bern, Switzerland) – „Thriving landscapes?“

An important prerequisite for reversing biodiversity loss is illuminating the value of nature and incorporating biodiversity values in decision-making. However, identifying the “true” value of biodiversity and ecosystem services is challenging. Particularly in economics, there have been several attempts to develop and improve methods for an economic valuation. However, the underlying methods are partly criticized and economic approaches have been rejected.

Against this background, the session focuses on biodiversity values, economic approaches and limitations. Both conceptual and methodological as well as issues of application and implementation will be presented and discussed.

Speakers:

• Martin Quaas (University of Leipzig, German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv)
  Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Germany) –
  „Concepts and Applications of Valuing Natural Capital“
• Jasper Kenter (Aberystwyth Business School, Aberystwyth University, Great Britain) –
  „Towards a relational economics of biodiversity“
• Lennart Stein (University of Greifswald, Germany) –
  „Increasing biodiversity through true cost accounting for food“
• Annike Eylering (Osnabrück University, Germany) –
  „Perceptions of biodiversity loss matter!?“

Chairperson: Bernd Hansjürgens (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ)
Co-Organizer: Nele Lienhoop (Bochum University of Applied Sciences)

With growing standards in daily life and the expectation of a permanent economic growth, resource demands particularly in the Global North have risen dramatically since the 1950’s. This has led and continues to lead to the destruction of highly vulnerable ecosystems, e.g. in the coastal areas in West Africa, in the Amazon region or in poorly researched but very particular ecosystems in Central Asia (e.g. southern Mongolia).

Beyond this, nature and biodiversity conservation is also a telecoupled phenomenon, where mostly urban dwellers consider nature and wilderness as something particularly valuable. They invest in species protection programs and force species protection policies while at the same time ignoring the troubles that these very selective programs cause for the Indigenous and local human populations that are dependent on their land. In addition, conservation is increasingly externalized to biodiversity hotspots in low-income regions, while the growing demand for resources like soy, lithium etc. is simultaneously met with imports from these countries. In this context, protected area governance and its effect on local populations is often ignored due to selective knowledge-based and one-sided conservation decisions. The perception of negative effects of telecoupled protection decisions on culture, knowledge, traditions and responsibilities of people for their land are not yet being sufficiently researched and should be considered much more intensively in future projects.

A challenge for the future will thus be to identify negative telecoupled effects on biodiversity on the one hand and negative impacts on the balance between nature and people on the other.

Speakers:

• Grace Wong (Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN), Kyoto, Japan) –
  „Financial flows, diverging interests and injustice in frontier governance in Mai Ndombe, Democratic
  Republic of Congo“
• Sébastien-Pierre Boillat (Bern University of Applied Sciences and University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland) –
  „Telecoupling and justice challenges in environmental initiatives: from biodiversity conservation to
  agroecology“
• Jens Newig (Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany) –
  „Sustainability Governance of Global Telecoupling“
• Shelby Matevich (University of Amsterdam, University of Wageningen, Netherlands) & Louise Carver
  (Fundación TBA21, Spain) –
  „Convivial Conservation offers a Theory of Change“

Chairperson: Thomas Jahn (ISOE – Institute for Social-Ecological Research)
Co-Organizer: Flurina Schneider (ISOE – Institute for Social-Ecological Research)

There is no doubt that the 23 targets of the post-2020 Global-Biodiversity-Framework are highly welcome and ambitious – the challenge now is to implement the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal COP 15. This raises the question of which procedures and methods of implementation can and should be used to achieve the objectives of these targets appropriately. The task is by no means trivial, as it is not just about preserving biodiversity, but about „system solutions“ that protect and preserve natural capital and at the same time make a positive contribution to human development („human capital“) and subsistence („produced capital“). This session will analyze concrete examples to critically examine possible contributions that transdisciplinary approaches and real-world labs can make to achieving the targets of the post -2020 Global-Biodiversity-Framework.

Speakers:

• Frank Ewert (Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research – ZALF, Müncheberg, Germany) –
  „Living labs to support agri-food system transformation – Concept, success and risk of failure“
• Eszter Kelemen (Environmental Social Science Research Group, Hungary) –
  „BioAgora – Connecting biodiversity knowledge and decision-making“
• Matthias Schündeln (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany) –
  „Environmental effects of development programs – Lessons learnt“
• Ranjini Murali (Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany) –
  „Engaging diverse worldviews to meet global biodiversity targets“

Chairperson: Volker Mosbrugger (FEdA, Senckenberg Society for Nature Research)
Co-Organizer: Eszter Kelemen (Environmental Social Science Research Group (ESSRG), Hungary)

Driven by globalization, transformation processes in society, technology and economy gain more and more importance for current and future biodiversity trends.

Climate and global change as anthropogenically caused phenomena, increasing demands for food, energy and water. Related intensification of land use and of the exploitation of natural and mineral resources cause dramatic losses in biodiversity, mainly in species diversity. Transformative processes, however, could also be used to protect and restore biodiversity, e.g. through energy change and related restoration of nature, innovative technologies in managing natural resources, through societal transformation toward less impactful nutrition or through Green Economy. Taking energy change as an example, transformation processes may have biased impacts at different scales: open-cast mining restoration opens new opportunities for rewilding. On the other hand, valuable ecosystems suffer from or are even destroyed through the compensatory demand for more renewables (wind, water and solar energy) or rare elements such as lithium. Abandonment as a societal process in economically weak regions results in opportunities to restore particularly forest landscapes, while at the same time rare open-land species lose their habitats.

Therefore, a challenge for biodiversity research will be to analyze more in detail the path and scale dependencies of different aspects of biodiversity (e.g. species diversity, genetic diversity, landscape structural diversity) from societal, technological and economic transformation processes to derive policy recommendations considering particularly risky or highly beneficial transformation opportunities.

Speakers:

• Yves Zinngrebe & Christine Polzin (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig, Germany) –
  „Impacts and dependencies of trade on biodiversity – Identifying knowledge needs“
• Stefan Knauß (Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany) –
  „What can we learn from successful transformation processes?“
• Marcus Düwell (Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany) –
  „Why and how to care about the future? Towards an ethics of biodiversity policy“
• Henrique Pereira (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Germany) –
  „Towards a positve future for nature“

Chairperson: Christine Fürst (Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg)
Co-Organizer: Marion Mehring (ISOE – Institute for Social-Ecological Research)