There is broad consensus on the need to live within planetary boundaries and ensure a safer future for present and future generations. However, significant disagreements persist on how to achieve these goals. This study explores the basis of these disagreements by examining the foundations of four competing approaches to sustainability and justice: Nature Protection, Green Economy, Land Stewardship and Biocultural Diversity, and Degrowth and Post-Growth.
One of the key findings of this study is that there are clear differences in how each stance values nature. In particular, Nature Protection tends to prioritize the intrinsic value of nature or "nature for itself"; the Green Economy tends to prioritize the instrumental values of nature or "nature for society"; Land Stewardship and Biocultural Diversity recognize these values but also emphasize the relational values of nature or "nature as society"; and Degrowth prioritizes these types of values, emphasizing sufficiency and redistribution.
The existing differences in valuing nature are the distinctive feature of each approach, and this divergence in underlying values helps explain why it is often difficult to reach a compromise between the different approaches. There is a tendency to be unreceptive to ideas from other stances, which makes it challenging to build a large-scale movement to resolve the climate and biodiversity crisis.
However, uncovering this basis of disagreement also helps us move forward, as it highlights the need for a more inclusive and potentially more transformative environmentalism, recognizing and respecting the plural values of nature. To this end, the study suggests three possible pathways: through working methods that make the plural values of nature visible and usable for decision-making; reforming relevant institutions to ensure that these plural values can be integrated into practice; and finally, addressing the power asymmetries that underpin the current dominance of the green economy approach.
Unai Pascual, co-author of the study and Ikerbasque researcher at the Basque Center for Climate Change, co-chaired the Values Assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and maintains that “it is important to recognize that there are significant differences regarding the values prioritized in the different pathways to sustainability, but it is equally important to be aware that shared values can be found among the different pathways and that these shared values can be leveraged to trigger transformative changes, so that we can live in harmony with nature.”
In a complementary article recently published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, Unai Pascual and his colleagues analyze how values about nature are integrated into decision-making. They point out that political and economic decisions that foster economic expansion tend to undermine a broad range of values aligned with sustainability, and even environmental policies also focus on a limited set of nature's plural values.
“Taken together, both studies point to the need to be aware of the diversity of values about nature and that such values need to be integrated into decision-making to transition to a more just and sustainable future. Failing to do so would jeopardize the opportunity to activate the social levers necessary to bring about transformative changes in all sectors of society,” concludes Pascual.
Bibliographic Reference
Link to the study in One Earth: https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(24)00146-5
Link to the study in Philosophical Transactions: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2022.0315
.png)
