Background – why is transformative change necessary to protect global common?

Industrie International assessments – especially the global report of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) – come to the conclusion that the decade until 2030 will be decisive as to whether it will be possible to significantly slow down both man-made climate change, as well as the huge losses of biodiversity on a global scale and to achieve a reversal towards a future within safe planetary boundaries.

Essential for succeeding in this endeavour, according to the global IPBES assessment, is a transformative change toward a sustainable use of natural resources based on social criteria as a fundamental part of a sustainable economy.

The concrete implications of these claims for the regulation of protection and use of the so-called global commons has not yet been sufficiently framed. Although almost all assessments promote radical, in other words transformative change, there is no consensus on how this can be achieved or fostered and what should be done differently than at previous attempts to promote the change called for. As global commons can only be successfully protected in a global context, the restructuring of development cooperation in the field of biodiversity and ecosystems conservation and restoration is especially crucial. Also in this respect concrete implications of the conclusions of the assessments are barely to be found.

This project wants to close this gap. To do this, the knowledge and recommendations of international studies are summarised and interpreted, in order to then develop, based on case-study examples from former projects, future-proof approaches. 

One of the challenges is to identify which changes in which social subsystems are successful, in order to foster transformative change for the conservation of biodiversity and functioning ecosystems. Furthermore, it is necessary to analyse how to foster this change interacting with the national and international political framework. This analysis identifies implications and first recommendations for mainstreaming the issue in national policies and emphasising the importance of international treaties on this behalf. Finally, together with development experts (e.g., from the Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), the KfW and the ZMT), we derive recommendations for the German and international development cooperation.