Introduction
Humanity has become a dominant force of change up to the planetary scale
(Crutzen 2002; Steffen et al. 2015). A dreadful outcome is the wrecking
of the Biosphere, despite decades of global conservation efforts. Recent
global environmental assessments indicate that wildlife populations have
dropped 68% on average since 1970 (WWF 2020) and one million species
are at risk of extinction in the coming decades (IPBES 2019a). The
future looks even more grim when considering that humanity is way off
track in limiting global warming to 1.5°C (UNFCCC 2021). These global
assessments univocally stress the need for deep, transformative changes
in human societies and economies if internationally agreed-upon
sustainability goals are to be achieved (Díaz et al. 2019; Secretariat
of the Convention on Biological Diversity 2020). Indeed, supported by
the present state of knowledge, human agency in the Anthropocene should
be able to “bend the curve” and create sustainable futures for people
and nature (Steffen et al. 2011; Bai et al. 2016; Leclère et al. 2020).
The internationally agreed-upon target space for a sustainable
development trajectory is presented by the 2030 Agenda of the United
Nations through its 17 interlinked Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
and 169 associated targets – that is, the future we want (UN
General Assembly 2012, 2015). Yet, while the Agenda 2030 is
forward-looking and aspirational, there is no universal understanding of
what a sustainable world for nature and people actually looks like, let
alone how to get there. In fact, as people in different places and
contexts around the world experience, depend on, and relate to nature in
many different ways, opening-up for pluralistic perspectives on the futures we want is imperative. What is clear, however, is
that most people and societies need to fundamentally rewire their
relationships with nature and each other; that there is an urgent need
for new ideas, visions and narratives of people-nature relationships to
enact transformative change towards just and sustainable futures for
life on Earth (Bai et al. 2016; Bennett et al. 2021; Wyborn et al.
2021).
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and
Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is actively supporting the development of new
narratives of desirable nature futures around the world. Building on the
findings of the IPBES Thematic Assessment on Scenarios and Models, the
IPBES Task Force on Scenarios and Models is mandated to catalyze the
development of new nature-centered multi-scale scenarios that are based
on positive visions for human relationships with nature (IPBES 2016, 2019b).
An important outcome so far is the development of the Nature Futures
Framework (NFF). This heuristic tool is used for the collaborative
creation of visions and narratives to open up a plurality of
perspectives on people-nature relationships while it simultaneously
offers a structure for consistency in the development of nature
scenarios across multiple scales and diverse contexts (Pereira et al.
2020). Place-based applications of the NFF may i) provide insights into
commonalities and divergences across desired visions of nature around
the world and their translation into goals and targets, ii) identify
scalable policies and actions for achieving desired futures, and iii)
develop more diverse sets of indicators to assess progress (Pereira et
al. 2020). Currently, there is an articulated need to extend the use of
the NFF in real-world case studies to operationalize it globally and to
drive an inductive process to develop and refine a family of new nature
scenarios (Rosa et al. 2017; IPBES 2019b; Pereira et al. 2020).
At the same time, promising initiatives that seek to transform the way
humans interact with nature are already happening ‘on the ground’. A
notable example where new narratives are being explored is the bottom-up
development process of National Park Hollandse Duinen (NPHD) in the
Netherlands. The ambition of this new National Park is to be a showcase
of how people and nature can co-exist (NPHD 2017, 2020a). The surface
area of ~450 km2 covers the entire
coastline of the province of Zuid Holland, including sea, beaches,
dunes, forests, agriculture, urban infrastructure and over a million
inhabitants (Veenstra 2020). The geo-morphological foundation was laid
5000 years ago and the interacting forces of nature and humans have
shaped this landscape ever since, resulting in exceptional
socioeconomic, cultural and ecological values (Van Heeringen and Van der
Velde 2017; Neefjes 2018). Current pressures however, including various
forms of pollution, urbanization, climate change and sea level rise, are
interacting and mounting. A group of local and regional actors
recognized that, in the face of the Anthropocene, maintaining the unique
landscape qualities and values requires an integrated and collaborative
effort that actively engages with the social-ecological complexity and
dynamism of the landscape. They initiated a National Park that aims to
“reinforce the quality and resilience of both natural and cultural
heritage in the landscape of the park by empowering people and
organizations to create synergy between natural processes and human
activities” (NPHD 2017). Thus, rather than through strict
protection, this National Park seeks to safeguard and even enhance
biodiversity values by taking an inclusive approach that is rooted in
social-ecological systems thinking (Palomo et al. 2014; Cumming et al.
2015; Cumming and Allen 2017). Yet, to achieve its aim and realize its
mission, NPHD faces a daunting change process involving numerous actors,
interests and desires.
The SDGs, the NFF, and NPHD can be seen as three distinct developments
that stem from the same philosophy to reconfigure people-nature
interactions towards the mutual benefit and sustenance of all, that is,
towards attaining the futures we want. As such, a pertinent
question is how these developments may be synergistically combined to
purposefully inform and reinforce each other towards that common aim,
also speaking to a broader challenge of useful integration of approaches
in sustainability research (Lang et al. 2012). In this paper, we present
an innovative approach to explore desirable nature futures, consisting
of a participatory workshop process and analytical framework. We
developed the approach through an application in the NPHD. The workshop
process strategically links the NFF to the Three Horizons Framework
(Sharpe et al. 2016) to capture diverse perspectives on nature and
develop the capacity of stakeholders of NPHD to envision desirable
futures and explore transformative changes to get there. The analytical
framework is developed to analyse the content of the workshop outputs
and consists of a thematic analysis and an SDG Target analysis. The
overarching aim of this study is twofold: test the NFF at the regional
scale and inform the development trajectory of NPHD. The latter includes
the potential to develop insights for achieving the SDGs.
We first give a detailed recipe of the workshop process including an
introduction of the core frameworks used. We then present the analytical
framework and report the results of the approach. In the discussion we
reflect on the outcomes and discuss how these outcomes may feed into
both the broader development process of the National Park as well as the
inductive scenario development process catalyzed by IPBES. We also
discuss how to further improve the approach and point to future research
needs.