Across millennia, people have developed various ways of understanding and interacting with nature and its different values. A paper by IPBES, underlines and establishes the need to shift social and institutional values away from emphasis on GDP growth and material accumulation to community-based, sustainability aligned values.
Published on Nature, the paper examines different sources of evidence to combine how people express nature’s values and understand how these values influence decisions. This involves understanding what values are considered and whose values are impacted.
According to IPBES, there’s still much work to fully incorporate this diversity into practice, which aims to integrate biodiversity and its various values into policies and processes.
To illustrate this value assessment, the paper introduces an inclusive typology of the many values of nature. A typology with four interconnected meanings of value, represented as “layers”.
The system typology parts are: worldviews and knowledge, big values, specific values, and value indicators. These typology layers show how people see the importance of different things in nature, like a watershed flowing into a wetland.
Summary Points
- Despite discussions about valuing nature’s benefits for human well-being over 25 years, challenges persist in addressing the global biodiversity crisis due to obstacles in including nature’s different values in decisions.
- These obstacles include norms and rules like property rights that decide whose values of nature are important.
- Understanding why nature’s value is sometimes overlooked is crucial.
- Even though commitments like the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and UN Sustainable Development Goals exist, current policies mainly focus on values related to markets, ignoring other ways people benefit from nature.
- This “values crisis” is linked to problems like loss of biodiversity, climate change, pandemics, and environmental injustices.
- The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) used research, policy documents, and local knowledge to learn about nature’s values and valuation methods, aiming to use them better in making policies.
- To overcome obstacles and improve valuation, they suggest using approaches that focus on different values, aiming for a fair and sustainable future for both people and nature.
Source: Jasper Kenter LinkedIn Profile and Pascual, U., Balvanera, P., Anderson, C.B. et al. Diverse values of nature for sustainability. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06406-9
Definition: The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is an independent intergovernmental body established by States to strengthen the science-policy interface for biodiversity and ecosystem services for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, long-term human well-being and sustainable development.
