New Strategic Plan: Revised Challenges

1. New Strategic Plan:Revised Challenges

2. Challenge 1 • Identify and act upon urgent detrimental changes in biodiversity and ecosystem services

3. Priority 1.1 • Development of a mechanism for regular assessment and reporting of detrimental change to biodiversity and ES that identifies and characterise the systems at risk, especially short term risk. • This priority should address the following sub-issues: • Impact • Risk • Predictability • Reversibility

4. Priority 1.1 - Questions • Questions: • Definition of criteria for the identification and characterisation (risk; magnitude of impact; definition of detrimental loss; use the term ""Detrimental change" in its broad sense e.g. cultural, fisheries). • Identification: list of system that are at risk of collapsing. Scan the globe and determine where the tipping points are. This list should be regularly reviewed. • Characterisation of the system or ES services at risk of collapsing. Quick and dirty, which will be improved by knowledge generated by Priority 1.3 (see below). Diagnose of the processes and drivers. • This priority relates to ICSU challenges "forecasting" and "observing".

5. Priority 1.2 • Develop solutions to avoid, mitigate, and limit impacts (including adaptation in the climate change definition); and restore or recover systems. Depend on the characterisation of the system (avoid or manage/mitigate): To be unpacked between: • - Emergency cases: mitigation and adaptations solutions • - Prevention cases: avoiding solutions • This priority relates to ICSU challenges: "confining", and in some extent to "innovating" and "responding".

6. Priority 1.3 • Improve understanding of mechanisms in order to determine the signals (or proxies for the signals), and to design interventions to the urgent systems identified in Priority 1.1. • This priority will provide new knowledge needed to refine the priorities 1.1 and 1.2, and to improve their outputs. • This priority is cross-cutting among the different ICSU grand challenges.

7. Priority 1.2 – Identify solutions To avoid detrimental changes • Priority 1.1 • Identification • Characterisation • Criteria for detrimental change Priority 1.2 – Identify solutions To mitigate detrimental changes (emergency) Priority 1.3 Mechanisms and processes understanding and Identification of signals of future detrimental changes

8. Challenge 2:Enhance the capacity of social-ecological systems to support biodiversity and ecosystem services under global change

9. Priority 2.1 Building the knowledge base for management practices that enhance the ability of social-ecological systems to maintain biodiversity and ecosystem services, with a focus on trade offs and synergies, as well as feedbacks, within and across scales. Key questions: What are the trade offs and synergies among ecosystem services and between ecosystem services and human wellbeing? What are the cross scale interactions of biodiversity and ecosystem services? What are the feedbacks of ecosystem services and biodiversity on the climate and earth systems and how will these change with time? How can we use / develop the knowledge base to better inform practice and policy? What are the relationships and implications of the distribution of ecosystem services and biodiversity for equity

10. Priority 2.2 • Enhancing the governance capacity of socio-ecological systems to cope with and shape the evolving dynamics of biodiversity and ecosystem services, including consequences for equity. • Key questions [undeveloped] • What are the interactions and linkages across biodiversity and ecosystem service governance systems across political scales • What are the individual and collective behaviours for adaptation and coping to biodiversity and ecosystem service change • What are the links between biodiversity change and the responses to these changes and how does this influence equity and distributional justice

11. 2.2 Understanding and enhancing the capacity of societies to cope with and shape the evolving dynamics of socio-ecological systems through governance and equity/justice Rationale to be completed: why the dynamics of socio-ecological systems pose unique problems of governance. - In social terms, adaptation has two dimensions. One is coping, that is modifying social norms, priorities, structures and the definition of the collective good in response to environmental change. The other is transforming, that is acting on the environment to maintain basic social priorities, norms and structures. One cannot assume a priori that there is an optimal way to adapt to a given environmental change. Adaptation is a resultant of strategies that seek to reduce the basic uncertainties that actors face. Societies do not choose a form of adaptation, they select strategies first. - Challenge #1 links the problem of biodiversity loss to the notion of acceptable risks and uncertainties. This challenge asks us to explore strategies that enhance learning and governance, including multi-scale governance of complex systems. Governance can be conceptualized as a system of formal and informal rules designed to coordinate interdependent activities and/or work toward the realization of a common good. This goes beyond authoritative policy-making and includes norms and practices. To deal with uncertainty and change, governance must be adaptive. Adaptive governance refers to polycentric institutional arrangements that foster collaborative, flexible and learning-based issue management across different scales.

12. Sub-questions: 2.2.1. understanding the linkages between governance systems across political scales - how can we reconcile various levels of governance: minimize contradictions and enhance synergies among local, national, regional, and international?). - can we develop distributed/decentralized models of institutional biodiversity governance, building on lessons learned from complex systems dynamics? 2.2.2. understanding individual vs social (collective) behaviour towards coping and adaptation to biodiversity change and ES (social adaptation strategies: how do societies select strategies? what kind of strategies have been used? with what success? and why?) 2.2.3. understanding the links between biodiversity change and responses with considerations of equity and social justice (e.g. ABS)

13. Priority 2.3 • Build the knowledge base to enhance the capacity of SES to (a) sustain human wellbeing across generations and (b) be active factors of beneficial transformation • Build scenarios of BD and ES ( as an input to visioning processes) contemplating: • Climate, • Land use, • Consumption patterns, • Innovation • Governance structures

14. For priority 2.3, we need to integrate across 3 scales – spatial, temporal, institutional. • From Jackson et al 2010, CoSust.

15. • Need to think about wording of the title: "Understand" is weak… better "Necessary, critical, or further understanding" or "Further develop the necessary understanding…" • Priorities re-phrased as researchable questions (as opposed to original phrasing). Less problem oriented than Challenges 1 & 3 • Rationale: (Salvatore) DIVERSITAS provides the legitimate framework – from the Programme’s scientific authority, scope and specific niche standpoint – for addressing fundamental questions pertaining to biodiversity. This challenge deals with the way biodiversity is shaped, at and through its various organizational levels, and how humans impact on, positively and negatively, its evolution and organization. Challenge 3

16. 1) How have evolutionary dynamics been altered by humans? Rationale: (Tet Yahara) During past 50,000 years, human beings have changed environments on the earth drastically by hunting, agriculture, pollution, trades and many other activities. Consequently, many organisms (including humans) have been forced to adapt to new environments through evolution. This change is still going on. To forecast biodiversity changes in future, therefore, we need to understand how humans altered evolutionary dynamics of organisms living under anthropogenic changes of environments. Links to current projects / programs: bioGENESIS, bioDISCOVERY / PAGES Question: can this be folded into priorities 2 and 3 Priority 3.1

17. 2)What are the mechanisms, especially biotic interactions and evolution, that drive the organization of biodiversity at genome, species, community and habitats/ecosystems levels? Rationale: (Bob Scholes) The interaction between the genome and the environment (including other organisms) gives rise to species and populations within species with particular attributes and spatial distributions. Further biotic interactions - including among others foodweb links, symbioses and mutualisms - organise and assemble these species and populations into ecosystems that have properties (expressed as structure, composition and function) that are more than the simple sum of the underlying attributes of the component parts. This is the fundamental basis through which bundles of ecosystem services are delivered, and the basis for 'the ecosystem approach' to biodiversity is managed. Human activities tend to simplify the system at all levels, with consequences for its persistence and the magnitude and reliability of service supply, especially under change in the drivers. Links to current projects / programs: all of the DIVERSITAS core projects. Priority 3.2

18. 3)What are the relationships between biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, ecosystem services and human well-being? Rationale : (Gene Rosa) Both implicitly in some contexts and explicitly elsewhere there is a clear objective function that cuts across global environmental change. It is to preserve and enhance the state of human existence and human well-being. Science biodiversity is the foundation of ecosystem services, it bears directly on that of human well-being. Hence, the pivotal role in understanding the causal connections between biodiversity change, ecosystem change and human well-being. Need to articulate the projects and sub-priorities in a way so that this is interesting to natural and social scientists. Links to current projects / programs: strong links to IHDP, GLP, PECS, IHOPE, ISSC Priority 3.3

19. 4)Status and trends in biodiversity: How fast, why, where and what? How rapidly is biodiversity changing, why is it changing, where is this occurring and what elements biodiversity are changing. How is this affecting ES & HWB? Old priorities 3.1-3.3 condensed into this priority Rationale: (Dan Faith) Stakeholders (e.g. CBD) need to know about (and report on) status and trends of various components of biodiversity. This information also helps determine environmental actions and policies. “How fast” helps determine urgency of action. “Why” points to key drivers; “where” and “what” captures information about which elements of biodiversity and where they are located – covering genetic, species, functional, and other elements of biodiversity. These needs imply critical research questions, particularly because we typically must estimate/ extrapolate from partial information/observations. Links to current projects / programs: GEO-BON, IPBES Priority 3.4