Rural and resource-based coastal communities in British Columbia (BC) are facing a number of pressing challenges that are affecting the holistic health and well-being of local people. The challenges facing coastal communities include being disconnected from decision-making process, a changing climate, rapidly evolving ecosystems, increasing pollution, declining investment, loss of community infrastructure, increasing competition over […]
A new report titled “The Thriving Coastal Communities Initiative: Towards an action research agenda focused on well-being in coastal communities in British Columbia” has been produced in a group effort between T.Buck Suzuki Environmental Foundation and OceanCanada‘s Dr. Nathan Bennett, as well as a large team of collaborators. Support for convening the initial meeting at […]
Existing scenarios of biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES) have important limitations and gaps that constrain their usefulness for the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Specifically, they fail to incorporate policy objectives related to nature conservation and social-ecological feedbacks, they do not address the linkages between biodiversity and ecosystem services, and they are typically relevant at only a particular spatial scale. In addition, nature and its benefits are treated as the consequence of human decisions, but are not at the centre of the analysis. To address these issues, the IPBES Scenarios and Models Expert Group initiated the development of a set of MultiscaleScenarios for Nature Futures based on positive visions for human relationships with nature. The first step of this process was a visioning work shop with stakeholders and experts on 4-8 September 2017 in Auckland, New Zealand. A total of 73 participants from inter-governmental organisations, national government organisations, non-governmental organisations, academiavand the private sector, from 31 countries, and with a range of sectoral expertise on biodiversity topics, from urban development to agriculture to fisheries, worked together in a visioning exercise. This report documents the results from this visioning workshop to inform further stakeholder consultation and the development of the associated multiscale scenarios by modelers and experts.