Co-creating pathways to desirable nature futures of temperate lakes

Many lakes in Europe reside in a degraded ecological state.

This project aims to improve lake management outcomes for long-term provisioning of ecosystem services by more effectively integrating people´s plural values of lake ecosystems into governance processes.

We achieve this by applying the ´Nature Futures Framework´ (NFF), a newly developed tool by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) to guide change processes towards desirable futures for nature and people.

We will operationalize the NFF for lake ecosystems through case studies in three catchment areas in Northern Europe (United Kingdom, Finland and The Netherlands), which represent a range of environmental gradients and encompass many of the anthropogenic pressures faced by temperate lakes globally.

In a co-creation process with relevant stakeholders in the case study areas, we will develop three types of knowledge – systems knowledge, target knowledge, and transformation knowledge – culminating in a tested ‘theory of change’ comprising a process design and tools for experiential learning that can be readily extrapolated to other temperate lakes globally.

PLURALAKES embodies a proactive endeavor to bridge the divide between policy formulation and on-the-ground lake management, delivering actionable insights to secure long-term provisioning of aquatic ecosystem services.