Governing for Transformative Change across the Biodiversity– Climate–Society Nexus

684 BioScience July 2022 / Vol. 72 No. 7 https://academic.oup.com/bioscience BioScience 72: 684–704. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biac031 Advance Access publication 1 June 2022 The global scientific community continues to warn that increasing climate change and biodiversity loss will have reinforcing and codetrimental impacts on humanity. These impacts include increasing vulnerability to food insecurity, health risks and disrupted livelihoods, and even involuntary displacements leading to potential social unrest (e.g., IPBES 2019, IPCC 2021, 2022). As the window to avoid far-reaching and irreversible impacts on people and nature rapidly closes (IPBES 2019, IPCC 2021, 2022), the current actions to address these global challenges are insufficient (e.g., Ripple et al. 2017, Arneth et al. 2020). Strategies to address some of the negative trends have been proposed. However, the feedback loops and interactions among biodiversity, climate, and society at multiple spatial, temporal, and organizational scales—what we label in the present article the biodiversity–climate–society (BCS) nexus—are generally ignored (Pörtner et al. 2021). This is problematic because the connections among climatic, ecological, and social systems transmit risks from one system to another. Response strategies that ignore these nexus interactions may significantly misestimate those risks, thereby increasing the chance of irreversible environmental changes across the planet (Simpson et al. 2021). To simultaneously address interlinked global challenges, the scientific community has increasingly emphasized the need for deep and urgent transformative changes across economies and societies. Transformative change is understood as game-changing shifts, or “fundamental, systemwide reorganizations across technological, economic, and social factors, including paradigms, goals, and values” (IPBES 2019: 14). Such emphasis by the global scientific community contrast with the policies being currently proposed that focus on incremental changes or changes restricted to actions that are accommodated within existing system structures and goals—for example, actions geared to increase energy efficiency within production life cycles under an overarching goal of constant and exponential economic growth. Given the current situation, we posit that incremental changes are unlikely to gain sufficient traction to be scaled up if they are not accompanied by broader system-wide institutional changes to create the structural conditions for such scaling up to occur. Incremental changes also risk being too slow to avoid severe negative impacts on people and nature. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) recent report (IPCC 2021) indicated that, if current emission levels continue, the 1.5 degrees Celsius Governing for Transformative Change across the Biodiversity– Climate–Society Nexus