Innovative session: Identifying Pathways for Transformative Change in the Tropics: Methods, Approaches and Perspectives

Rafael Calderón-Contreras, Karina Boege Pare

Transformative change for a just and sustainable world is urgent, necessary and challenging but possible, to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and safeguard life on Earth. The recently approved Transformative Change Assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) represents a significant milestone in designing and implementing policies, methods, approaches, and perspectives for transforming the tropics and enhancing their contribution to a more sustainable and just world. This Innovative session will introduce the core aspects of the Transformative Change Assessment, including the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, key approaches to achieving transformative change, and forward-looking strategies, with a special emphasis on tropical environments. Moreover, it will provide illustrative examples of core issues of Transformative Change in working groups designed to involve all participants of the session in a world café-like strategy.

The session will kick off with a presentation about the main findings of the Transformative Change Assessment, and will continue with speed talks (5 minutes) on 5 core topics for Transformative change in the context of tropical biology and cultural conservation. Each topic will be illustrated with a case study from a tropical social-ecological system and all the session’s participants will be invited to make a round to attend the different working groups, where coordinators will create a flipchart of the most important comments from the participants. These coordinators will present the most important findings at the end of the session, with the possibility of creating an agenda for further discussion and collaboration. 

The idea of the session is to create and reinforce a community of knowledge and practice directed towards exploring the potential for implementation of the main findings of the Transformative Change Assessment onto different tropical contexts. It also aims at illustrating the current efforts for applying the results of the Assessment into different tropical social ecological systems (specially from the south), such as those already included in the Latin American Node of the Programme for Ecosystem Change and Society, and the newly created Society of Social Ecological Systems.