We can no longer ignore nature in our political and economic decision-making

In a preface to a special feature in the journal, co-written with Prof Gretchen C. Daily, Director of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, Pro Malhi said: “The value and importance of the natural world is not sufficiently accounted for in economic or other decision-making processes, and bringing nature into decision-making provides the potential for a systemic solution to this challenge.

There is powerful evidence and growing recognition that this decline matters – not only because of the intrinsic value of Earth’s biodiversity, but also because the degradation of the web of life threatens human well-being today, social and economic progress, and even the future of our civilisation.”

Prof Malhi leads the Ecosystems research programme at the Environmental Change Institute (ECI), and is Professor of Ecosystem Science, and Jackson Senior Research Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford. He is also Director of the Oxford’s Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery (LCNR) which acts as a hub for innovative thinking, discussion and analysis of nature recovery nationally and worldwide. The LCNR unites leading researchers from a wide range of disciplines across the University, bringing together expertise from the departments of geography, ecology, social science, finance, economics, psychiatry, anthropology, artificial intelligence, statistics and earth observation, to collaborate on a range of projects, in conjunction with national and international partners.

Profs Malhi and Daily say recent developments and statements have raised awareness of the biodiversity crisis, resulting in high-level calls to “bend the curve” of biodiversity loss within a decade, and to create nature-positive economies and businesses. New policy impetus has come from the adoption of the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework, and well as a flurry of new nature-focused legislation at supernational, national, and city levels.

How exactly this can be achieved at scale and across sectors remains a major challenge. However, there has been substantial progress in developing successful demonstrations of integrating nature into decision-making in a variety of sectors and regions. 

This special feature examines some of the greatest challenges and most promising solutions for bringing nature into decision-making at scale. Solutions include:

• Assigning values to nature which are then embedded in key environmental policy instruments: protected areas for nature and payments for ecosystem services. 
• Highlighting the pioneering approach in Costa Rica with a system giving value to standing forests which reversed deforestation.
• The transnational corporations who are taking nature into account in their decision-making who all share similar critical success factors.
• The development of national natural capital accounts to increase integration of the values of nature into decision-making. 
• Cities that have enhanced urban nature and reveal what lessons can be learned for replicating and scaling up models of success.
• Children’s exposure to nature in the school environment showing enhanced benefits for children’s physical and mental health, focus at school, and nurturing of pro-nature attitudes. 
• The global intertwining between humanity and the biosphere, navigating human actions and societies within a global safe operating space.

Prof Malhi said: 

As a collection, these papers highlight the urgency of bringing nature into decision-making, and also demonstrate the real progress in application of data rich tools that facilitate such decision-making, while at the same time reminding us that there are deeper issues around our relationship with the straining biosphere that need examination and remedying.”

Read the feature in full: Bringing nature into decision-making