Transformative pathways for synergising just biodiversity and climate actions

• Research unit: SERI
• Project number: 22.00443

Abstract (English)

The global biodiversity and climate crises cannot be solved in isolation or by merely ramping up what is already being done. Urgent and ambitious transformative changes are needed in our economies and societies. Through inclusive deliberation TRANSPATH identifies leverage points and interventions for triggering transformative changes at consumer, producer and organisational levels. It seeks wholeof- society opportunities for achieving climate-neutrality whilst simultaneously allowing local communities and nature to flourish. TRANSPATH draws on diverse contexts in Eastern and Western Europe, Africa and Latin America, to engage with those who affect and are affected by trade regimes and associated ‘greening’ mechanisms. Through deliberation on alternative visions, values, actions, and their systemic interactions across scales and over time, TRANSPATH identifies leverage points that can trigger positive cascading biodiversity changes. Policy packages and other interventions are designed, to enable the emergence of leverage points at different scales of action in ways that changes the choice architecture underlying daily decisions. These interventions consider the synergies and tradeoffs of actions across multiple people and places, and the role of incentives and political barriers to implementation. TRANSPATH delivers a suite of Transformative Pathways with a Toolbox of Transformative Interventions for triggering and enabling these pathways. A Transformative Navigation Toolkit guides practitioners on how to enable and navigate pathways, acknowledging that arriving at what constitutes a ‘transformative pathway' is also a product of an iterative and adaptive process that emerges and evolves over time. To implement these, TRANSPATH develops a multi-scalar network of activated agents of change, who can foster inclusive and legitimate decisions, and build capacity and willingness among their actor networks to collectively move forward on transformative pathways.