BIONEXT is a research and innovation project that fights for nature and biodiversity. This groundbreaking Horizon Europe project supports the currently ongoing IPBES Nexus and Transformative Change Assessments.
Biodiversity and nature’s benefit to people are key to human development and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. The first assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in 2019 documented how current trends of biodiversity loss and threaten life as we know it and called for transformative change.
Transformative change is needed to address the major challenges to nature and humankind, such as biodiversity loss, climate change, and social injustice. Transformative changes are fundamental shifts in the way we think, act, and organise our society. A change is only transformative if it shakes up ecological, technological, and socio-economic systems. While the need for transformative change is clear, less is known about what these changes entail and how they might be triggered.
The BIONEXT project answers IPBES’s call for transformative change, by running parallel to and complementing the ongoing IPBES assessments. It will research the links and interdependencies between biodiversity, water, food, energy, transport, climate, and health; and explore how transformative change towards sustainability can be triggered.
In BIONEXT’s work package 2 entitled ‘Triggering Transformative Change’, DRIFT aims to find what that change is and how we can set it in motion. We do so in in three ways. First, we set out to create a better understanding of justice and transformative change in the biodiversity nexus. We do this by exploring how it is understood by the diverse research communities connected to the biodiversity nexus.
Second, we explore tangible options to enable just transformative change across policy, private sector, and civil society. This will result in a conceptual framework that we will use to identify practical options for change. The conceptual framework allows us to evaluate what enables or constrains positive systemic transformations across policy, private sector, and civil society.
Third, engagement and co-creation is essential for making these insights from research actionable. Together with diverse, relevant stakeholders, WP2 is co-creating transition pathways for key biodiversity nexus interlinkages, developing policy lessons and action points to better acknowledge multidimensional aspects of justice in transformative change.
