Engaging with the science and politics of biodiversity futures: a literature review

• Published in: Environmental conservation Vol. 48; no. 1; pp. 8 - 15
• Main Authors: Wyborn, Carina, Louder, Elena, Harfoot, Mike, Hill, Samantha
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.03.2021
• Subjects: Anthropocene; Anthropocene epoch; Biodiversity; Climate change; Community ecology; Conservation; Decision making; Ecosystems; Environmental changes; Futures; human population; Human populations; humans; Literature reviews; natural resources conservation; Overexploitation; Politics; pollution; Population growth; Scholarships & fellowships; Science; Social sciences; Society; Subject Review; Thematic Section: Biodiversity Revisited; Urbanization; Values; Wildlife conservation; Anthropocene; futures thinking scenarios; imagination; anticipation; biodiversity futures
• ISSN: 0376-8929; 1469-4387; 1469-4387
• DOI: 10.1017/S037689292000048X

Future global environmental change will have a significant impact on biodiversity through the intersecting forces of climate change, urbanization, human population growth, overexploitation, and pollution. This presents a fundamental challenge to conservation approaches, which seek to conserve past or current assemblages of species or ecosystems in situ. This review canvases diverse approaches to biodiversity futures, including social science scholarship on the Anthropocene and futures thinking alongside models and scenarios from the biophysical science community. It argues that charting biodiversity futures requires processes that must include broad sections of academia and the conservation community to ask what desirable futures look like, and for whom. These efforts confront political and philosophical questions about levels of acceptable loss, and how trade-offs can be made in ways that address the injustices in the distribution of costs and benefits across and within human and non-human life forms. As such, this review proposes that charting biodiversity futures is inherently normative and political. Drawing on diverse scholarship united under a banner of ‘futures thinking’ this review presents an array of methods, approaches and concepts that provide a foundation from which to consider research and decision-making that enables action in the context of contested and uncertain biodiversity futures.