Organizer: Christine Fürst, Co-Organizer: Marion Mehring
Moderation: Marion Mehring

Climate and global change as anthropogenically caused phenomena, increasing demands for food, energy and water. Related intensification of land use and of the exploitation of natural and mineral resources cause dramatic losses in biodiversity, mainly in species diversity. Transformative processes, however, could also be used to protect and restore biodiversity, e.g. through energy change and related restoration of nature, innovative technologies in managing natural resources, through societal transformation toward less impactful nutrition or through Green Economy. Taking energy change as an example, transformation processes may have biased impacts at different scales: open-cast mining restoration opens new opportunities for rewilding. On the other hand, valuable ecosystems suffer from or are even destroyed through the compensatory demand for more renewables (wind, water and solar energy) or rare elements such as lithium. Abandonment as a societal process in economically weak regions results in opportunities to restore particularly forest landscapes, while at the same time rare open-land species lose their habitats.

Therefore, a challenge for biodiversity research will be to analyze more in detail the path and scale dependencies of different aspects of biodiversity (e.g. species diversity, genetic diversity, landscape structural diversity) from societal, technological and economic transformation processes to derive policy recommendations considering particularly risky or highly beneficial transformation opportunities.

Speakers:

Henrique Pereira (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Germany) – “Towards a positve future for nature”

Stefan Knauß (Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany) – “What can we learn from successful transformation processes”

Yves Zinngrebe (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig, Germany) – “Impacts and dependencies of trade on biodiversity – Identifying knowledge needs”

Marcus Düwell (Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany) – "Why and how to care about the future? Towards an ethics of biodiversity policy"