People and Nature

Challenges

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) concluded that addressing biodiversity loss requires economies and governance systems to urgently transform the way they operate. This was echoed by the Edinburgh Declaration, and signed by the Scottish Government, calling on parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity to ‘take strong and bold actions to bring about transformative change... in order to halt biodiversity losses.' Forthcoming policies and commissioned reviews by the Scottish Government and agencies reflect the urgency of this change. They provide strategic directions which focus on greater inclusivity in the conversations around the uses of land, supporting a well-being economy and the first national review of the role of indirect drivers on biodiversity loss.

Transformative change is fundamental if we are to address the limitations of finite growth and move towards values, structures and institutions that promote a “good life” with a focus on ecological and social well-being. Bringing together diverse knowledge and fostering greater democracy has long been recognised within sustainability concepts. These concepts recognise the importance of public and civil society knowledge creation alongside academic, economic, and political knowledge systems. This is supported by evidence that increasingly suggests that conservation and biodiversity measures succeed best when a plurality of voices and diverse forms of knowledge can be engaged in the co-development of management solutions. Further developments propose that sustainability will be best achieved when new knowledge and know-how are in balance with nature. This supports the need to transform how nature and the economy are currently framed and measured and thus lead to more just and sustainable ways of living with our natural world.

Questions

Solutions

This project identifies and evaluates interventions, research approaches and processes which can facilitate transformative change in how biodiversity in Scotland is framed, valued, managed, and governed. It is also exploring how the benefits associated with Scotland’s biodiversity can be harnessed and more equitably distributed by engaging with a plurality of voices and values.

Nature and Economy

We explore nature-economy relations and the implications of different framings for managing nature. We focus on a high-level understanding of the risks and ethical implications of different nature-economy relations and address questions, relating to barriers, scales, and multiple benefits, through narrative scenario planning and deliberation. The takes a broad-based approach including terrestrial and marine environments. It enables us to reflect on the wide spectrum of nature-economy relations, for example including common pool resources, and impacts on small and remote communities. The findings are being summarised in a podcast.

Enabling inclusivity in biodiversity narratives 

This project is identifying narratives and narrative approaches which are usually outside of biodiversity research and developing and evaluating audio-visual and interactive narrative tools and techniques to better enable their productive engagement for transformative change. This includes the development of a spatial, audio-visual digital platform enabling greater inclusion of diverse biodiversity narratives to facilitate engagement, listening, and learning concerning biodiversity narratives.

Enabling transformative biodiversity research and change 

Following feedback from stakeholders, we are focusing on how novel land management interventions and transformative research can enable more diverse, sustainable, and just futures. This is limiting the transformative changes explored to those that impact the way biodiversity is valued, managed, and governed by land managers, focusing on farming and crofting communities. This involves identifying factors, interventions, and processes which facilitate the transformative change of how biodiversity is valued and managed. A participatory video process is being explored for its potential to engage communities with the complex issues surrounding nature conservation and farming, especially concerning threatened bird species.

Values 

Taking a value plurality and relational perspective, we are also exploring different societal, economic, and biological values associated with biodiversity. We are doing this within the framing of nature conservation and farming specifically in areas of conservation conflict, and exploring, how these values may be leveraged and changed with transformative research. We are using participatory video research to assess and monitor the impacts of transdisciplinary research on people’s values, and how these values influence land management and biodiversity conservation prioritisation. This is a novel but critical piece of research filling a gap in biodiversity value research. It focuses on farming communities co-existing with high conservation value species in multi-functional landscapes.

Harnessing Green and Blue Infrastructure for people and nature 

This activity focuses on how to further measure and develop green-blue infrastructure for multiple benefits by understanding and exploring the impact of two types of greenspace interventions:

• Improvements in greenspace ‘quality’
• Nature-health and nature-engagement programmes that seek to modify people’s behaviour.

Building on the Creating Natural Connections project, We are doing this through personal digital stories of impact as well as ‘quality-of-life’ questionnaires with intended beneficiaries and residents. The integration of complementary strands of enquiry to monitor and measure the impacts of greenspace interventions allow us to identify areas where green-blue infrastructure could be further harnessed for multiple benefits.