Suneetha M. Subramanian

This report examines the often-overlooked costs of governance in integrated landscape approaches and argues for treating governance infrastructure as a core investment in sustainable development. Drawing on experiences from landscape initiatives around the world, it explores the recurring functions needed to sustain multi-stakeholder coordination, inclusive decision-making, planning, monitoring, learning and institutional continuity. Based on responses from 30 representatives of landscape initiatives, the report provides evidence on governance costs, the factors that influence them and the consequences of underfunding. It proposes priority actions for policymakers, funders and practitioners to better recognize and resource landscape governance, including through multi-year funding, stronger support for multi-stakeholder platforms and the integration of governance costs into investment design. The report highlights how sustained investment in governance infrastructure can strengthen coordinated action and support more effective delivery of biodiversity, climate, restoration and other sustainable development objectives.

Drawing on long-term empirical and quantitative studies, this report explores enset-based agroforestry as a resilience-building production system that addresses policy priorities in food security, climate adaptation and sustainable livelihoods. It is part of a thematic series on socio-ecological production landscapes (SEPLS) — integrated landscape and seascape systems shaped by long-term interactions between people and nature. Across the globe, SEPLS are maintaining biodiversity and supporting local livelihoods, cultural values and sustainable resource management.

This report highlights the immediate need to reform subsidies and incentives that negatively impact biodiversity and human well-being in socio-ecological production landscapes and seascapes (SEPLS) — areas where the interaction between people and the landscape maintains or enhances biodiversity while providing humans with goods and services. Drawing on a diverse set of perspectives from local actors, the report explores the nuances of how different types of subsidies and incentives affect the environment and livelihoods. It provides policy solutions to support and respond to Target 18 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which calls for identifying and phasing out harmful subsidies by 2025 and reforming them by 2030.

Drawing from first-hand experiences managing productive landscapes and seascapes, this brief provides insights on how landscape approaches can promote biodiversity-friendly business through local stewardship, cross-level collaboration and peer learning. Landscape approaches are collaborative strategies that promote biodiversity-friendly business practices. These approaches involve diverse stakeholders, such as local communities and other actors along the value chain, working together at a landscape or seascape scale. Leveraging landscape approaches to advance sustainable business practices for biodiversity is an iterative process, involving adaptation and course correction to accommodate diverse needs and interests among stakeholders. This enhances collaboration across and beyond a value chain. These approaches also capitalize on traditional knowledge, which has been embodied through augmenting local experiences and wisdom to help integrate different knowledge systems that are complementary, creating new business opportunities for biodiversity-friendly innovation. Recommendations: (i) Bolster local stewardship to build and pursue a common vision with enhanced recognition of the livelihood and business values of biodiversity; (ii) Institutionalize a participatory approach to cross-level collaboration that incorporates review and monitoring and capacity development elements; and (iii) Promote biodiversity elements in education and peer-learning to mainstream biodiversity in business in alignment with global policy goals for sustainability.

The recent Values Assessment conducted by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) highlights the impact of different worldviews on people's relationship with nature. This paper summarizes the findings from a literature review that examined nature-culture interconnections and how they play out in outcomes related to conservation and human well-being. It seeks to highlight the various ways in which Nature as Culture is conceptualized and further, generalized. It also aims to identify a short set of promising indicators that could be used for scenario modelling for nature futures work and identify potential areas of research to explore further in this field to ensure that the concept is more robustly embedded in plans to operationalize policy goals on sustainability, including biodiversity conservation. The paper emphasizes the need for further research in this area, calling for methods that incorporate a diverse range of resources across ecosystems, species types and national borders. It highlights ground-truthing and primary data collection as essential components in understanding intrinsic, instrumental and relational values for fostering sustainable practices.

Landscape approaches help to effectively facilitate ecosystem restoration for the benefit of people and nature, by leveraging Indigenous and local knowledge and enhancing context-specific cooperation between stakeholders. The process of applying landscape approaches to ecosystem restoration should be multi-lateral, iterative and inclusive. It needs to be navigated by communicating and interacting with stakeholders across different sectors and levels. Recommendations: (i) start at the landscape or seascape scale to identify and mobilize local resources and capacities for long-term restoration efforts; (ii) promote peer learning and knowledge sharing to develop integrated solutions for restoration and sustainable development, and upscale them for broader impact; (iii) institutionalize local restoration efforts as part of coherent policies and frameworks to facilitate systemic change in human–nature interactions.

Other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs) can achieve positive biodiversity outcomes in a larger area than is covered by protected areas. But this requires OECMs to be better integrated into sustainable production systems in conjunction with protected areas. Good examples of productive social-ecological systems exist. Recognising potential OECMs requires recognising the cultures that make them possible. Recommendations: (i) fully recognise and support the role of culture in fostering interlinked human–nature relationships and nurturing biodiversity in production landscapes and seascapes; (ii) develop sustainable market mechanisms using landscape approaches that promote respect for local cultures and the rights of all stakeholders; (iii) apply good practices for empowering cultures to enhance long-term biodiversity outcomes; (iv) provide innovative incentives including capacity development to encourage local communities to manage their landscapes and seascapes for biodiversity conservation.

The time is now: For decades, scientists have been raising calls for societal changes that will reduce our impacts on nature. Though much conservation has occurred, our natural environment continues to decline under the weight of our consumption. Humanity depends directly on the output of nature; thus, this decline will affect us, just as it does the other species with which we share this world. Díaz et al. review the findings of the largest assessment of the state of nature conducted as of yet. They report that the state of nature, and the state of the equitable distribution of nature's support, is in serious decline. Only immediate transformation of global business-as-usual economies and operations will sustain nature as we know it, and us, into the future. Science , this issue p. eaax3100