Increasing capacity to produce scenarios and models for biodiversity and ecosystem services

Abstract

Extensive anthropogenic activities driven by the demand for agriculture and forestry products have led to dramatic reductions in biodiversity worldwide and significant changes in the provisioning of ecosystem services. These trends are expected to continue in the future as the world continues to develop without much consideration of the role that nature plays in sustaining human livelihoods. Scenarios and models can be important tools to help policy- and decision-makers foresee the impact of their decisions; thus, increasing capacity in creating such models and scenarios is of utmost importance. However, postgraduate training schools that focus on this topic are still rare. Here we present and reflect on the experience of the São Paulo School of Advanced Science on Scenarios and Modelling on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services to Support Human Well-Being (SPSAS Scenarios). In addition, we introduce the Special Issue of Biota Neotropica that resulted from the activities taking place during the SPSAS Scenarios. In total, nine case studies emerged from the activities carried out during SPSAS Scenarios. These focused on a variety of ecosystems, their current drivers of change and expected trends, as well as on the development of alternative positive scenarios applying the recently developed Nature Futures Framework. We emphasize the need to increase capacity in scenario and modelling skills in order to address some of the existing gaps in producing policy-relevant scenarios and models for biodiversity and ecosystem services.

A scenario- and spatial-downscaling-based land-use modeling framework to improve the projections of plausible futures: a case study of the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area, China

“…To fill the gap, nature-centered scenarios, including the Nature Futures Framework (NFF), developed by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), were proposed. The NFF describes positive relationships between people and nature, from multiple aspects, such as nature as culture, nature for society, and nature for nature (Lundquist et al 2020), to capture interlinkages of social-ecological systems across biodiversity, ecosystem functions and services, and human well-being (IPBES 2016b; Rosa et al 2020). In Japan, a new research project named Predicting and Assessing Natural Capital and Ecosystem Services (PANCES), which uses an integrated social-ecological system approach, was launched to predict and assess the natural capital and ecosystem services under national-scale future scenarios (Saito et al 2019).…”