Seeding transformative futures for people and nature in Africa

The failure to meet global sustainability goals, most notably for biodiversity, highlights the need to develop transformative strategies to restore the planet. Scenarios are powerful tools to examine how different choices could affect nature and human wellbeing in the future.

However, global scenarios largely ignore the fundamental role of the biosphere in supporting a good quality of life and, furthermore, do not allow participants to experiment with the transformative changes necessary for the achievement of sustainability goals.

To address this gap, this project aims to co-produce scenarios of how transformative change could lead to more sustainable futures for people and nature in Africa.

Building on work by the IPBES task force to develop multiscale scenarios based on positive human-nature relationships, we adapt a method to co-produce transformative scenarios for the African continent.

Although Africa will be hit hard by environmental change, its largely intact biocultural diversity holds much potential.

Undertaking this exercise with African stakeholders to generate scenarios where Africa transforms towards sustainability will result in novel academic outputs as well as build futuring capabilities on the continent.

By creating new scenarios that foster inclusivity and promote imagination, this project will address a key knowledge gap on how to enable transformative change towards sustainability and will also contribute a case study to the ongoing IPBES work plan.