Diverse values of nature for sustainability.

Twenty-five years since foundational publications on valuing ecosystem services for human well-being1,2, addressing the global biodiversity crisis3 still implies confronting barriers to incorporating nature's diverse values into decision-making. These barriers include powerful interests supported by current norms and legal rules such as property rights, which determine whose values and which values of nature are acted on. A better understanding of how and why nature is (under)valued is more urgent than ever4. Notwithstanding agreements to incorporate nature's values into actions, including the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF)5 and the UN Sustainable Development Goals6, predominant environmental and development policies still prioritize a subset of values, particularly those linked to markets, and ignore other ways people relate to and benefit from nature7. Arguably, a 'values crisis' underpins the intertwined crises of biodiversity loss and climate change8, pandemic emergence9 and socio-environmental injustices10. On the basis of more than 50,000 scientific publications, policy documents and Indigenous and local knowledge sources, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) assessed knowledge on nature's diverse values and valuation methods to gain insights into their role in policymaking and fuller integration into decisions7,11. Applying this evidence, combinations of values-centred approaches are proposed to improve valuation and address barriers to uptake, ultimately leveraging transformative changes towards more just (that is, fair treatment of people and nature, including inter- and intragenerational equity) and sustainable futures.

Participatory research in times of COVID-19 and beyond: Adjusting your methodological toolkits.

Solving grand environmental societal challenges calls for transdisciplinary and participatory methods in social-ecological research. These methods enable co-designing the research, co-producing the results, and co-creating the impacts together with concerned stakeholders. COVID-19 has had serious impacts on the choice of research methods, but reflections on recent experiences of "moving online" are still rare. In this perspective, we focus on the challenge of adjusting different participatory methods to online formats used in five transdisciplinary social-ecological research projects. The key added value of our research is the lessons learned from a comparison of the pros and cons of adjusting a broader set of methods to online formats. We conclude that combining the adjusted online approaches with well-established face-to-face formats into more inclusive hybrid approaches can enrich and diversify the pool of available methods for postpandemic research. Furthermore, a more diverse group of participants can be engaged in the research process.

Ensuring a Post-COVID Economic Agenda Tackles Global Biodiversity Loss.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused dramatic and unprecedented impacts on both global health and economies. Many governments are now proposing recovery packages to get back to normal, but the 2019 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Global Assessment indicated that business as usual has created widespread ecosystem degradation. Therefore, a post-COVID world needs to tackle the economic drivers that create ecological disruptions. In this perspective, we discuss a number of tools across a range of actors for both short-term stimulus measures and longer-term revamping of global, national, and local economies that take biodiversity into account. These include measures to shift away from activities that damage biodiversity and toward those supporting ecosystem resilience, including through incentives, regulations, fiscal policy, and employment programs. By treating the crisis as an opportunity to reset the global economy, we have a chance to reverse decades of biodiversity and ecosystem losses.

The Push, Pull, and Enabling Capacities Necessary for Legume Grain Inclusion into Sustainable Agri-Food Systems and Healthy Diets.

Legume grains are traditional crops that have been modernized as processed foods and animal protein alternatives in recent years. This modernization has largely been fueled by new technological developments driven by increased consumer demands for plant protein and gluten-free options. However, consumers must be mindful that legumes have other nutritional attributes besides protein that help achieve healthier diets, and recent evidence suggests that consuming 100 g of legume grains per day would promote nutrient-dense diets and could be a target level to harmonize international strategies for recommended daily allowances. The nutritional richness of legumes has been associated with a decrease in numerous disease risk factors and, given their long shelf life, legumes are excellent choices to combat food waste and may have a role to play in countries where cold storage is often a limitation in food preservation. Besides their inclusion in global diets, legumes should be included in sustainable cropping systems. The high number of edible species and cultivars available render them excellent contributors to biodiverse food and feed systems. Legume cultivation allows reducing environmental impacts by means of the ability of legumes to fix atmospheric nitrogen via a symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, making them natural fertilizers. Still, despite the well-known health, nutritional, and environmental benefits, legumes are underrepresented in global agri-food systems. Efforts must be made to make legumes more attractive to the farmer, the industry, and ultimately the consumer, and for this proper local, regional, national, and global policy frameworks must be in place. Here, the local scenario of legumes is showcased, and the most relevant push, pull, and enabling capacities required to achieve sustainable diversified agri-food systems with legumes are discussed.

Evaluation of participatory planning: Lessons from Hungarian Natura 2000 management planning processes.

Stakeholder participation in nature conservation policies and especially in the management of protected areas has gained importance in the last decades. These changes are underlined by democratic principles and the perceived contribution of stakeholder involvement to the effectiveness of conservation management. Evaluating participatory processes is essential to learn about the past and thus increase the quality of future processes. The evaluation can be useful for the organisations responsible for planning and management, stakeholders and policy makers as well. The present paper shows the results of a systematic evaluation of 25 participatory processes related to the development of management plans for Natura 2000 sites in Hungary between 2007 and 2015. A conceptual framework was developed to evaluate the process and outcome of participatory management planning processes. Criteria were based on the scientific literature on public participation and tailored to conservation-related management planning and stakeholder involvement. Evaluated processes were grouped in three cases based on their time range and financial sources. Overall, the analysed processes scored at a medium level, showing better performance in the process criteria than in the outcome criteria. The best case scored significantly higher in four criteria compared to the other cases: representativeness, resource availability for facilitation, new, creative ideas and impact on the plan. The main factors behind the success were (1) embeddedness of the planning process in a larger project, where the plan was a tool for conservation, (2) carrying out only one process at a time, (3) previous experience of facilitators and planners with participatory planning and (4) the opportunity and capacity to propose a payment scheme as an incentive. But even this case received low scores in some criteria: conflict resolution, early involvement and well defined goals. Based on the results we suggest that more data is needed to evaluate the implementation of the plans and, in many cases, the impact of the process on the plan. Performance can be improved with the assistance of policy makers by further developing guidelines, harmonising payment schemes with the conservation measures of the plans and providing training on conflict resolution. The evaluation framework proved to be suitable for the assessment of a large set of conservation related management planning processes, but it also had some limitations, e.g. concerning the incorporation of stakeholders' views in the evaluation.

Learning and the transformative potential of citizen science.

The number of collaborative initiatives between scientists and volunteers (i.e., citizen science) is increasing across many research fields. The promise of societal transformation together with scientific breakthroughs contributes to the current popularity of citizen science (CS) in the policy domain. We examined the transformative capacity of citizen science in particular learning through environmental CS as conservation tool. We reviewed the CS and social-learning literature and examined 14 conservation projects across Europe that involved collaborative CS. We also developed a template that can be used to explore learning arrangements (i.e., learning events and materials) in CS projects and to explain how the desired outcomes can be achieved through CS learning. We found that recent studies aiming to define CS for analytical purposes often fail to improve the conceptual clarity of CS; CS programs may have transformative potential, especially for the development of individual skills, but such transformation is not necessarily occurring at the organizational and institutional levels; empirical evidence on simple learning outcomes, but the assertion of transformative effects of CS learning is often based on assumptions rather than empirical observation; and it is unanimous that learning in CS is considered important, but in practice it often goes unreported or unevaluated. In conclusion, we point to the need for reliable and transparent measurement of transformative effects for democratization of knowledge production.