Project
TRANSPATH - Transformative pathways for synergising just biodiversity- and climate actions
Urgent and ambitious transformative changes are needed to address the global biodiversity and climate crisis. TRANSPATH seeks opportunities for addressing climate change whilst allowing local communities and nature to flourish. The project draws on diverse contexts in Eastern and Western Europe, Africa and Latin America. Through deliberation on alternative visions, values, actions, and their systemic interactions across scales and over time, TRANSPATH works on identifying leverage points at consumer, producer and organisational levels that can trigger positive cascading biodiversity changes.
Introduction
Biodiversity is declining at unprecedented rates, which will lead to significant consequences at a global scale. There is widespread agreement among science- and policy communities that conventional policies will not be enough to halt biodiversity loss or curb climate change. More urgent and ambitious ‘transformative changes’ are needed to the ways in which we live, and the ways in which our economies and societies use- and relate to nature and natural resources. Transformative change focuses on the fundamental system-wide restructuring of the root causes to sustainability challenges, which are underpinned by complex social paradigms, values and behaviours.
Description
Despite a growing consensus that transformative change is needed, it is still quite unclear how to make this operational in practice. How can the European Union (EU), in its global context and with its Member States, leverage the opportunities for enabling and accelerating transformative actions on the ground? How can synergies between multiple transformations at the EU level deliver on global goals to reduce biodiversity loss and carbon emissions? And how can we ensure the emergence of diverse pathways to transformative change that are just and sustainable both now and beyond 2050? TRANSPATH contributes to answering these questions by focusing on the design and integrated assessment of a suite of transformative pathways that hold potential to accelerate shifts in unsustainable patterns of extraction, production, consumption and trade.
The contribution of the Public Administration and Policy group to TRANSPATH is on two fronts. Firstly it leads the work on developing the conceptual, methodological and normative framework for the identification and development of leverage points for transformative pathways that together with empirical testing in TRANSPATH will allow the identification of specific policy mixes, policy strategies and enabling conditions that can be implemented at EU and local case studies. Secondly it contributes to the development of multi-scalar science-policy-practitioner labs in the Western European cases in the Netherlands.
