The voices of youth in envisioning positive futures for nature and people

During the first IPBES youth workshop in 2019, held in São Pedro, Brazil, 33 early-career individuals cam together to explore positive futures of biodiversity and ecosystem services. On the one hand, this process addressed the need to include the perspective of the youth from 23 different countries into futures thinking and decision-making. On the other hand, this is only the starting point of valuable contribution by youth from around the world to IPBES’s work and scenario planing.

The NFF triangle was used as an activation tool to familiarize with the framework, think in diverse value perspectives and create four interest-driven groups for the following visioning exercises. Cities, rural landscapes and coastal ecosystems were assigned as broader topics to each group. Afterwards, the groups worked with seeds to envision the future. Methods such as naming the vision, creating a tweet and newspaper headline as well as in-depth questioned added detail to the visions while they were graphically depiced by ocal artists.

The groups came up with four visions:

1. Anthropocene 2.0, representing the centre of the NFF triangle and focussing on coastal landscapes
2. Econetlands = representing the Nature as Culture perspective and centre of the NFF triangle with the focus on cities
3. Rural Transformers = representing the Nature for Society perspective and focussing on rural landscapes
4. Iandé Etama = representing the Nature for Nature perspective with the focus on rural landscapes

All visions aim for a value shift towards sustainable and equitable societies in which alternatives to the current capitalis paradigm, such as circularity and sharing economy, are persued. Generally, mellenials are open to technology which is as well reflected in their visions with various technological aspects in contrast to the scenario archetypes by the IPBES.

A key finding of this process was that engaging early career professionals in participatory visioning exercises is of extreme relevance in the political-scientific context of coproduction of science and solutions.