European FEdA-Conference Statement

“Designing the European Research Landscape to Reverse the Trend in Biodiversity Loss and to Achieve Sustainability”

The major global challenge for humankind is to achieve a system transformation towards sustainability in all of its three dimensions: “Prosperity” (economic issues), “People” (social issues) and “Planet” (environmental issues). Only if we resolve the conflicting goals of economic prosperity, peaceful coexistence and the preservation of nature, it will be possible to stop the loss of biodiversity, as well as climate change and environmental pollution and thus to safeguard human well-being.

The complexity of addressing this global challenge is well illustrated by the difficult and protracted negotiations of the various UN Conferences of the Parties on climate change and on biodiversity. As IPBES (Annex II to decision IPBES-8/1, 2021) rightly points out: “transformative change for nature and people presents specific challenges as it involves the consideration of science-based and indigenous and local knowledge-based understandings of biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people, together with normative ethics, different worldviews and collective values about visions of a sustainable future.” Moreover, the required transformative change needs to cover and consider all spatial scales, from local to global, as well as all temporal scales, from short-term (<decades) to long-term (>100 years).

The science and funding landscape must also align itself with this transformative change and undergo a corresponding transformation itself to overcome its strong disciplinary tradition. This necessity is well reflected by Albert Einstein’s famous statement:

“You can never solve problems with the same way of thinking that created them.”

It is precisely here, in the development of new planetary thinking (as outlined for instance by Dipesh Chakrabarthy, 2021) and of options for integrative sustainable system pathways (in the sense of IPBES, see above), where there is the mega-challenge for science today. To meet this mega-challenge, we need a major transformation of the traditional sustainability research design and research funding to foster new thinking and approaches. More specifically, the European Green Deal and the efforts to implement the European Biodiversity Strategy and to achieve the UN SDGs should be accompanied by a re-design of the European and national research landscape which complements the classical (and still necessary and relevant) disciplinary and interdisciplinary research concepts with

A) national and European research programs which foster transdisciplinary, systemic (i.e. nexus-oriented) and transformative research on

• planetary thinking, including global justice and stewardship, and consequent holistic approaches ranging from the micro- to the macroscale
• analysis and modelling of complex social-ecological systems, based on planetary thinking,
• options for synergistic sustainable system solutions based on planetary thinking,

B) funding and evaluation schemes adequate for transformative transdisciplinary research, including long-term studies and strong partnerships with relevant stakeholders, reinforcing the sustainability goals,

C) transdisciplinary and systemic education, training and PhD-programs preparing for and promoting planetary thinking and transdisciplinary systemic sustainability and transformative research,

D) broad research initiatives to explore and harness the potential of digitalization, open science and advanced data science and technologies to develop options for integrative system solutions for sustainability and corresponding transformation pathways (see UNESCO Recommendations on Open Science, 2021),

E) innovative dialog formats between science, policy and administration, the private sector, and the general public to initiate societal negotiation processes in contentious decision-making situations, beyond sudden crises such as the Covid19-pandemic,

F) “governance experiments” that allow testing different sets of regulations at landscape scales, accompanied by transdisciplinary systemic sustainability and transformation research.

Based on these ideas we propose national and European transdisciplinary workshops (i.e. including stakeholders) to explore options for adapting the funding and research landscape toward promoting and strengthening planetary thinking, transdisciplinary and systemic sustainability and transformation research, and supporting local to global system transformation to sustainability for the future that we want and need. These workshops should also help to further develop a fair research environment for researchers.

Adopted at the European FEdA-Conference “Biodiversity and Human Well-Being – Europe’s Role in Shaping our Future” on November 11, 2022.

Signees