(Deze publicatie en paper zijn in het Engels)
How can Europe become nature-positive by 2050? While there is broad agreement that transformative change is needed to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, there is far less agreement on what such change should look like in practice. In a new paper published in People and Nature, DRIFT researchers and colleagues explore this question through the co-creation of three distinct pathways toward nature-positive futures in Europe.
The study is based on a 2.5-day participatory foresight workshop organised within the Horizon Europe project BIONEXT. Twenty-three participants from diverse backgrounds worked together to develop pathways from the present day to 2050, using the Nature Futures Framework and backcasting methods to move from desirable futures towards concrete actions and milestones.
The resulting pathways reveal that there is no single route to a nature-positive Europe. Instead, each pathway reflects a different understanding of how transformative change unfolds.
Dòigh Nàdair
A community-led pathway that embeds biocultural values in governance, education, and everyday life. It combines local stewardship, stronger rural economies, and the deliberate phase-out of extractive systems to create a more reciprocal relationship between people and nature.
NaturAll
A sufficiency-based pathway that places ecological limits at the centre of society. Through rights of nature, resource caps, land restoration, and participatory governance, it gradually reduces environmental pressures while ensuring human wellbeing within planetary boundaries.
Return to Nature
An innovation- and governance-driven pathway that strengthens institutions, mainstreams biodiversity and climate objectives, and mobilises investment in sustainable solutions. Public support grows through crises and coordinated action across governments, businesses, and society.
Beyond describing these pathways, the paper analyses how participants’ different perspectives on transformative change shaped the pathways they created. Some participants favoured more radical and bottom-up transformations, while others focused on feasibility, governance reform or technological innovation. The findings demonstrate that plurality is not only present in visions of the future, but also in the assumptions people hold about how change happens.
The research contributes to ongoing debates on transformative change for biodiversity by showing how participatory foresight can make diverse perspectives explicit and translate abstract concepts into concrete actions and governance strategies. At the same time, it highlights the importance of carefully designing such processes, as the methods used can influence which perspectives become represented in pathway development.
As biodiversity governance increasingly embraces concepts such as transformation and nature-positive futures, the study raises an important question: how can we create space for multiple understandings of transformative change while still building collective direction and action?
Read the paper: Plurality in transformative change: Three co-created pathways toward nature-positive Europe(s)
Illustrations by Maria Fraaije
