The IPBES assessment incorporated information from more than 4,000 such lists to evaluate the global status of alien taxa. Without them, governments cannot report on their obligations under the Convention on Biological Diversity, whose Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework requires regular reporting on which alien taxa are present and which are invasive. The new special issues comprise 11 articles in African Biodiversity & Conservation addressing Africa, five articles in Bioinvasiones covering Latin America and the Caribbean, and 12 articles in NeoBiota presenting work of broader interest.

The 28 papers, authored by 134 researchers, describe lists for entire countries such as Ecuador, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe, the Philippines and South Africa; for islands and marine regions off southern Brazil and the coast of Namibia; and for protected areas in Brazil and Johannesburg. Others compare regions, such as a floristic comparison between Mexico and South Africa, or focus on particular groups, including grasses in Madagascar and social wasps in the South Pacific. The guest editors deliberately chose journals that would not exclude researchers lacking well-resourced institutional backing.

African Biodiversity & Conservation and Bioinvasiones are platinum open access, meaning no author page charges, and Bioinvasiones accepts manuscripts in English, Portuguese or Spanish. NeoBiota, ranked in the top 25 percent of its category in Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports, does charge page fees, a compromise the editors acknowledged may have diverted at least one submission elsewhere. The proposal went out in July 2024, expressions of interest were solicited through academic networks, government contacts, the Global Register of Introduced and Invasive Species community and even snowball sampling, and the issues were published in early 2026.

Born from a 2011 GBIF workshop in Copenhagen and formalised through the Convention on Biological Diversity's GIASI Partnership, GRIIS presents validated national checklists of introduced and invasive taxa at country, territory and island level, covering all kingdoms of life. Its datasets are now identified as a key resource for the headline indicator of Target 6 of the Kunming-Montreal framework, the rate of invasive alien species establishment. Sub-national lists feed national databases, which in turn feed GRIIS, creating a chain from local observation to global reporting.

Many Global South countries are megadiverse, yet they face the greatest threats from global environmental change and from expanding trade pathways. Sub-Saharan Africa is the most vulnerable region to invasive agricultural pests, and some of the most damaging biological invasions occur in the Global South. African countries other than South Africa appear to have relatively few established alien taxa, but the editors caution that this apparent scarcity likely reflects a lack of monitoring and consolidation rather than genuine freedom from invasions.

Two barriers stand out: terminology and language. The IPBES assessment flagged a lack of standardised terminology for invasive alien species monitoring as having a moderate negative impact on understanding and management. Rather than enforcing their own sensibilities, the guest editors practised what they describe as avoiding verbal hygiene: authors were free to use their preferred terms, whether checklist, database, list or inventory, as long as terms were clearly defined and consistently applied.

To ensure interoperability, however, they recommend linking to formal data standards, such as the Darwin Core controlled vocabulary that states whether a species is native to a location, how it got there and to what extent it has become a permanent feature. Language matters just as much. One study cited in the introductory article showed that global databases of vertebrate abundance in Brazil increased roughly tenfold when data from non-English Brazilian journals were incorporated.

This raises a critical question: is the perceived data deficiency on alien species in various regions a genuine knowledge gap, or is the information sequestered in local-language reports excluded from global assessments? As a small contribution, the introductory article itself has been translated into French, Portuguese and Spanish, though the editors note these are all languages of European origin. The special issues also reveal practical lessons.

Workflows and protocols received detailed attention, with papers on developing watch lists, standardising names, translating names into indigenous languages, declaring taxa absent and identifying trees suitable for planting. Others incorporated citizen science, molecular information and roadside surveys into decision-ready lists. What was lacking, the editors admit, are articles explicitly analysing how lists are perceived and used, and how they deliver benefits.

Demonstrating the value of lists per se is difficult because the counterfactual is often unclear, yet measuring the impact of interventions is crucial if investment in their upkeep is to continue. The editors' recommendations are pragmatic: structure data and make them available, use data standards and metadata, list data sources and confidence levels, take a modular approach, document workflows, integrate with reporting requirements, commit dedicated resources, and learn by doing. Lists provide an imperfect snapshot of invasions at a particular time, but if they are FAIR and tidy, they can document change over time and facilitate adaptive management.

The hope is that this coordinated effort, alongside South-South collaboration and support from the Global North, will help lists serve local end-users and international science alike, turning scattered observations into the evidence base that integrated governance demands.

Subject of Research: Biodiversity and Conservation

Article Title: Developing lists of alien taxa in the Global South

Article References: Wilson, J. R. U., Dechoum, M. S., Faulkner, K. T., Langdon, B., Pagad, S., Pauchard, A., Seebens, H., Zengeya, T. A., & Ziller, S. R. (2026). Developing lists of alien taxa in the Global South. NeoBiota, 107, 269-286. https://doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.107.185317

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/neobiota.107.185317

Keywords: biological invasions, invasive alien species, Global South, biodiversity, IPBES, NeoBiota, Developing, lists, alien, taxa, Global, South

Its horizontal creeping growth form impedes access to light for subordinate species, its phenolic-rich litter lowers nitrogen availability in the soil, and its nitrogen-poor leaves make it unpalatable to herbivores. Through these mechanisms, crowberry can shift entire vegetation communities, deteriorating the quality and quantity of grazing pastures that underpin the iconic reindeer husbandry of the indigenous Sámi people. Climate change has amplified the shrub's expansion, adding crowberry encroachment to a list of Arctic disruptions that includes rain-on-snow events, birch treeline expansion, moth outbreaks and willow shrubification.

Yet the same plant is also a resource. Its berries, rich in antioxidant substances, are an important food source for indigenous people, wader birds and herbivores. Crowberry endophytes have been tested for anti-inflammatory substances in the treatment of urinary catheter-associated infections, and polyphenolic compounds from its leaves possess orosensory properties that could make the species fit for industrial food production.

The new review identified twelve positive and negative impacts in total, including one benefit overlooked by previous reviews: carbon fixation. Because crowberry stores a higher proportion of carbon per unit biomass than other vegetation, its allelopathic encroachment paradoxically increases the total volume of carbon sequestered in Arctic ecosystems. To make sense of this duality, the research team applied three competing concepts: ecosystem services (ES), ecosystem disservices (EDS) and nature's contributions to people (NCP).

The ES framework, formalised in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, classifies nature's benefits into provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting groups, and underpins major initiatives such as TEEB, SEEA, MAES and CICES. But ES covers only the benefits humans receive from nature, leaving detriments out. The EDS concept, defined in 2008, was created to address species' real or perceived harms to human well-being.

Despite its usefulness, EDS literature remains scarce: a systematic review showed that EDS articles represent just 0.4 percent of the total ES literature, with 87 percent published after 2012. The NCP concept, constructed by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), was intended to provide a more pluralistic philosophy within nature-human relationships. IPBES reframed services as contributions to underline a gifting relationship rather than a lord-and-servant impression, and surrounded NCP with two other foci of values: nature itself, encompassing impacts on other organisms and biophysical processes, and good quality of life.

The framework redefined provisioning, regulating and cultural ES as material, regulating and non-material NCP, and claimed that NCP includes both nature's benefits and detriments. The review's central finding challenges that claim. Amongst the twelve impacts of crowberry, the three detriments — plant growth inhibition, biodiversity depression and habitat deterioration — are all indirect, operating through allelopathic suppression of neighbouring plants' regeneration, reduced species richness and degraded wildlife habitat.

No direct disservices of crowberry were found in the literature. When the team mapped these impacts onto the frameworks, the results diverged sharply. Under the MA framework, the twelve impacts divided into five groups, including supporting EDS, making indirect negative impacts conceptually visible.

Under MAES/CICES, however, the three indirect detriments could only be considered negative impacts on ecosystem condition, because the framework neither addresses nor categorises disservices. Within the IPBES framework, eight sub-categories were used, but the names of the eighteen NCP sub-categories reflect only positive impacts of nature on humans, so the three indirect negative impacts were again left uncategorised. This divergence matters because decision-makers tend to act faster when both species' detrimental and beneficial impacts are known rather than when only the positive impacts are recognised.

The authors propose integrating EDS into the MAES/CICES and IPBES frameworks, classified in a manner parallel to existing ES categories. For CICES, this could mean introducing a new, parallel Disservices section with its own Divisions, Groups and Classes, mirroring the existing Services section. Such a layered approach would maintain the clarity and consistency that are the hallmarks of CICES while transforming it into a truly comprehensive framework for assessing the full spectrum of nature's contributions, both positive and negative.

The analysis also reveals a semantic conflict at the heart of the services terminology. The purpose of the MA framework was to emphasise the indispensable relationship between nature and humans so that nature would be accorded conservation priority in policy development, embedding positivity within the ES concept. But more recent works, especially the TEEB initiative, separated the services that nature provides from the benefits that humans receive.

If the service itself can have different directions of influence on human beings under different contexts, then ecosystem services can be seen as a neutral noun — and the term ecosystem disservices, coined with negativity, would not have been necessary. This philosophical conflict will remain unless the importance of both the benefits and detriments that humans receive from nature is recognised. The review also demonstrates that the NCP concept, contrary to IPBES claims, does not consistently offer a more inclusive lens for assessing multifaceted impacts, due to the lack of elements equivalent to disservices.

Subcategories like habitat creation and maintenance or regulation of climate still describe nature acting for our good, rather than acknowledging harm such as allelopathic encroachment. The authors suggest improving the neutrality of NCP subcategories and adopting an endogenous perspective in assessing nature's contributions, treating positive and negative effects of invasive species as contributions or disservices directly from the species themselves rather than as exogenous factors influencing other NCPs. They also warn that combining supporting and regulating ES into regulating NCP may lead to double counting in the valuation phase, since values should only be assessed once.

Ultimately, the choice of concept may depend on specific research objectives. The MA framework, though dated, explicitly allows space for supporting EDS, making indirect negative impacts visible. MAES and CICES provide clearer operational categorisation but exclude disservices.

IPBES claims conceptual neutrality yet in practice does not explicitly accommodate either direct or indirect negative contributions. By explicitly identifying the indirect detriments of crowberry, this study reveals a shared gap across these frameworks, where negative indirect impacts have historically not been a primary focus and remain weakly categorised despite their growing relevance.

Subject of Research: Assessment of crowberry's beneficial and detrimental impacts using ecosystem services, ecosystem disservices and nature's contributions to people frameworks

Article Title: How dis-services illuminate divergence between “nature’s contribution to people” and “ecosystem services” – an assessment of Empetrum nigrum

Article References: Nhat, P., Armstrong, C., Tuomi, M., & Bråthen, K. A. (2026). How dis-services illuminate divergence between “nature’s contribution to people” and “ecosystem services” – an assessment of Empetrum nigrum. One Ecosystem, 11, Article e141552. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.11.e141552

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/oneeco.11.e141552

Keywords: crowberry, Empetrum nigrum, ecosystem services, ecosystem disservices, nature's contributions to people, Arctic, Fennoscandia, Sámi, reindeer husbandry, invasive species, CICES, IPBES

The research, led by scientists connected to the EU-funded SELINA project, draws on an extensive review of 111 guidance documents written in twelve European languages, ranging from English and German to Bulgarian, Croatian, Hungarian and Swedish. Unlike previous reviews, which focused on peer-reviewed scientific literature, this study deliberately mined the so-called grey literature: project reports, official policy documents, instruction manuals and other practical guidance produced across Europe since 2018. The authors argue that this body of material captures the real-world state of the art in how ecosystem service assessments are actually designed and executed, rather than how they are idealised in academic journals.

The motivation for the work stems in part from two reviews conducted for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Values Assessment. Those reviews independently found a striking lack of documentation of uptake in ecosystem service assessment publications across all method types, whether biophysical, economic or socio-cultural. A decade earlier, a review of economic valuations found that only about two percent documented any uptake at all. The new study’s authors note that, despite growing political interest in nature valuation, little has improved in the intervening years when it comes to evidence that assessments actually influence decisions.

This disconnect is particularly striking given recent policy momentum in Europe. The EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 calls for an EU-wide methodology to map, assess and restore ecosystems so they can continue delivering benefits to society. The proposed Nature Restoration Law would require Member States to restore twenty percent of the EU’s land and sea by 2030, with specific targets tied to ecosystem condition variables and ecosystem service indicators such as organic carbon stocks. Meanwhile, ecosystem accounting is being standardised internationally and implemented across the EU, with national statistical offices working to integrate ecosystem extent, condition and biophysical service accounts into official environmental economic accounts.

To bridge the gap between knowledge supply and policy demand, the research team organised their review around seven diagnostic topics, each chosen for its potential to strengthen the robustness and relevance of assessments. Four topics target the biophysical core of assessment practice: spatial resolution and scaling capability; the integration of ecosystem condition; the distinction between ecosystem service capacity, potential, supply, use and demand; and the documentation of uncertainty. Three further topics address plural valuation, examining how well biophysical assessments can be combined with economic valuation, with assessments of social benefits and justice, and with human health benefit assessment.

Each diagnostic topic was evaluated independently by groups of five to seven co-authors with diverse assessment experience and language skills, using structured surveys to extract how each guidance document defined and addressed the topic and where in the policy cycle the guidance was intended to apply. The teams then distilled their findings into checklist questions for practitioners and commissioners of assessments. The resulting checklists, published as supplementary materials, are organised around the five-step plural valuation framework recommended by the IPBES Values Assessment: investing in a legitimate process, defining the purpose with stakeholders, establishing the scope considering plural values, choosing and applying methods, and communicating results for decisions.

The review revealed clear patterns in where existing guidance is strong and where it falls short. Coverage of the policy cycle is best for agenda setting, policy formulation and implementation, but weakest for policy adoption and retrospective policy evaluation. In other words, guidance literature offers relatively little support for choosing between competing policy options or for evaluating the outcomes of decisions already taken. The authors also found that guidance on biophysical methods, such as ecosystem condition and service capacity, rarely addresses stakeholder engagement or legitimacy, whereas guidance on economic, social and health benefits consistently recommends involving stakeholders in the assessment process.

Perhaps most revealing is what the checklists do not cover. The review teams supplemented the guidance-derived questions with additional ones addressing gaps they identified from their own practitioner experience, with a particularly large expansion of questions on social and health benefits, legitimate involvement of local communities, and the practical challenges of spatial scaling and of distinguishing capacity from demand. Notably, no additional questions were added to the uncertainty checklists, because that topic was the subject of a separate dedicated review still under way at the time of writing.

The authors are candid about the limits of their approach. Checklists, they stress, operate on the supply side of knowledge: they can help practitioners design better studies, but they cannot guarantee that political actors will use the results. Drawing on a political valuation typology, they describe how assessments can be affirmatively used to counterbalance injustices, confirmatively used to justify decisions already taken, or even appropriated, repressed or discriminated by powerful actors pursuing private interests. In such settings, sponsors may actively resist the documentation of uncertainty precisely because it could cast foregone conclusions into doubt. Recognising these political dynamics, the authors argue, is essential for understanding why technically sound assessments sometimes fail to influence policy.

The checklists are intended as flexible menus rather than rigid protocols: given the vast variation in assessment contexts, not every question will be relevant to every application. The next step is empirical validation. Within the SELINA project, the checklists will be tested in demonstration projects across partner countries, where researchers and stakeholders will assess whether the questions genuinely identify design features that increase uptake. The longer-term ambition is to refine them into templates for terms of reference that can be used to commission and design future ecosystem service assessments. If successful, the approach could help close a decade-old gap between the growing science of valuing nature and the decisions that depend on it.

Subject of Research: Best-practice checklists for increasing the uptake of ecosystem service assessments in European policy

Article Title: Increasing uptake of ecosystem service assessments: best practice check-lists for practitioners in Europe

Article References: Barton, D. N., Immerzeel, B., Brander, L., Grêt-Regamey, A., Kato Huerta, J., Kretsch, C., Le Clech, S., Rendón, P., Seguin, J., Arámbula Coyote, M., Babí Almenar, J., Balzan, M., Burkhard, B., Carvalho-Santos, C., Geneletti, D., Guisado Goñi, V., Giannakis, E., Liekens, I., Lupa, P., … Villosalda, M. (2024). Increasing uptake of ecosystem service assessments: best practice check-lists for practitioners in Europe. One Ecosystem, 9, Article e120449. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.9.e120449

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/oneeco.9.e120449

Keywords: ecosystem services, ecosystem assessment, IPBES, policy uptake, MAES, Nature Restoration Law, ecosystem accounting, uncertainty, plural valuation, SELINA project, guidance documents, EU Biodiversity Strategy

NeFo was founded in 2009, three years before the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, came into existence. At the time, Germany’s biodiversity research landscape was diverse but fragmented, with institutions scattered across universities, museums, government agencies, and civil society. NeFo’s mission was to bring these actors together, strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration, and build a bridge between research and policymaking. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and implemented by the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig and the Museum for Natural History Berlin, the initiative ran 42 workshops between 2010 and 2018, attracting more than 1,200 participants from 70 countries.

To understand what these workshops actually accomplished, researcher Jonas Geschke of the University of Bern turned to social network analysis, a mathematical framework that maps relationships between actors and quantifies the structure of their connections. Every institution that sent a representative to a NeFo workshop became a node in the network, and any two institutions whose representatives attended the same event were linked. The resulting co-participation network grew from just 55 institutions connected through two workshops in 2010 to 564 nodes spanning 471 named institutions, 14 freelancers, and 79 participants without a declared affiliation by 2018.

The structural evolution of this network tells a compelling story. In the early years, the network was small and tightly knit, with a clustering coefficient of 0.90 and a density of 0.60, meaning most institutions attended the same events. As the network expanded, density naturally declined to 0.16 by 2018, but the average shortest path between any two institutions rose only modestly, from 1.40 to 1.87 steps. This means that even as hundreds of new actors joined, the network retained its fundamental property: any institution could reach nearly any other through just one or two intermediaries. That structural resilience, the study suggests, is precisely what workshops are designed to produce.

Perhaps the most striking finding concerns who was showing up. Scientific institutions participated in all 42 workshops and accounted for roughly two-thirds of attendees on average, but their relative share declined significantly over time. Meanwhile, the relative participation of business institutions increased significantly, a trend confirmed by quasibinomial regression analysis with Holm-adjusted statistical testing. This shift toward broader stakeholder inclusion, the author argues, reflects a move toward more integrative and participatory knowledge exchange processes, quantitatively supporting earlier hypotheses about the growing transdisciplinarity of biodiversity research in Germany.

The network analysis also revealed a clear core-periphery structure. At the center sat the two NeFo host institutions, the Museum for Natural History Berlin and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, along with the German IPBES Coordination Office, the Technical University Berlin, and the German environmental ministry. These institutions occupied positions of high betweenness centrality, meaning they frequently sat on the shortest paths between otherwise disconnected actors. In network theory, such brokers are critical: they control information flow, bridge structural holes, and enable collective action across community boundaries. Nineteen institutions in total showed high potential to bridge different parts of the network, though the study is careful to note that these metrics identify structural opportunities for brokerage rather than evidence that knowledge was actually transferred.

Cluster analysis using the Louvain algorithm revealed five distinct communities within the 2018 network, which mapped closely onto NeFo’s project priorities. The two largest clusters corresponded to German biodiversity research and IPBES stakeholder engagement, while smaller clusters represented workshops on societal topics such as human-nature relationships and the Sustainable Development Goals. Workshops addressing emerging topics like animal movement ecology, citizen science data quality, and agrobiodiversity under climate change showed the highest edge betweenness, indicating they served as structural bridges connecting different parts of the network.

The study is transparent about its limitations. Co-participation in a workshop does not necessarily mean that two institutions exchanged knowledge, collaborated on research, or influenced policy. The links represent opportunities for interaction rather than documented relationships, and the cumulative nature of the network means that some structural changes may simply reflect growth rather than genuine transformation. The author acknowledges that broader contextual developments, including the establishment of IPBES, the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals, and increased funding for transdisciplinary initiatives, likely contributed to the network’s expansion alongside NeFo’s own activities.

Despite these caveats, the findings carry significant practical implications for anyone designing science-policy engagement activities. The study derives three key lessons from the NeFo experience. First, workshops on emerging topics tend to attract more diverse participants than those on well-established themes. Second, strategic collaboration and co-organization with partners from other sectors can broaden interest and integrate otherwise isolated actors. Third, follow-up activities such as joint publications can extend discussions beyond individual events and foster genuine knowledge co-production. These principles, the author suggests, apply broadly to boundary organizations seeking to connect actors across disciplines, sectors, and governance levels.

As biodiversity loss continues to accelerate globally, the need for effective science-policy interfaces has never been more urgent. The NeFo case demonstrates that national initiatives can create repeated, structured opportunities for institutions to connect, and that even modestly funded workshop programs can generate lasting network infrastructure. Yet the study also highlights a persistent vulnerability: without sustained institutional support, boundary organizations remain dependent on short-term project funding, and no single institution is both able and willing to shoulder the full cost of convening diverse stakeholders. As the author concludes, establishing a trustworthy biodiversity competence network requires exactly the kind of sustained, cross-sectoral commitment that workshops, at their best, are designed to enable.

Subject of Research: Social network analysis of workshops as a boundary-spanning tool in biodiversity science-policy interfaces

Article Title: Workshops as a boundary-spanning tool: the case of the Network-Forum on Biodiversity Research Germany

Article References: Geschke, J. (2026). Workshops as a boundary-spanning tool: the case of the Network-Forum on Biodiversity Research Germany. Frontiers in Environmental Science, 14, Article 1930490. https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2026.1930490

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fenvs.2026.1930490

Keywords: biodiversity, science-policy interface, social network analysis, workshops, IPBES, boundary organizations, knowledge exchange, NeFo, network analysis, stakeholder engagement, transdisciplinarity, environmental governance

The journal’s founding Editor-in-Chief is Henrique M. Pereira, Professor of Biodiversity Conservation at the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), who also leads the General Zoology department at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and serves as an Invited Professor at BIOPOLIS/InBio, Universidade do Porto. In an Editorial accompanying the first issue, Pereira explains that the journal is organized into sections dedicated to key topics of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), including pollution, climate, biodiversity, terrestrial and freshwater or marine ecosystems, social-ecological interactions, and nature contributions to people. Each section is overseen by a diverse group of academic editors drawn from across all six inhabited continents, a structure designed to ensure that editorial judgment reflects the geographic breadth of the field.

In interviews accompanying the launch, Pereira argued that the scientific publishing landscape has not kept pace with the complexity of environmental challenges. There are already many journals in the field broadly, he noted, but they are too specialized, covering only parts of the challenges in ecosystem research, or they are too expensive for scientists to publish in. What motivated him to join PLOS, he said, is the need for a truly transdisciplinary journal that integrates all scientists working to address ecosystem change, biodiversity loss, and associated environmental problems. He framed the central scientific challenge as pinpointing which parts of this complexity can yield solutions for policies and management approaches that practitioners can use to lead nature and people toward a positive path.

Pereira’s stated vision for the journal extends beyond publishing the best research in ecosystem and biodiversity science. He emphasized publishing research that is societally relevant and read by practitioners and decision-makers around the world, with the explicit aim of accelerating the speed at which research in this field is taken up. This orientation toward the science-policy interface is reflected throughout the first issue, which opens with an Opinion piece by Anne Larigauderie, former Executive Secretary of IPBES, titled “What science does biodiversity action still need? Lessons from a decade of IPBES.” The piece assesses the state of biodiversity research after ten years of the intergovernmental platform and considers the role the new journal can play in closing persistent gaps between evidence generation and biodiversity action.

Among the research articles in the debut issue is a data-focused study with unusually practical implications for the entire field: “Ambiguous data licences undermine global ecosystem mapping efforts.” The authors examined the Global Ecosystems Atlas Data Catalogue and found that one-third of its 343 datasets lack license information entirely, fewer than half are shared under Creative Commons licenses, and one in five carry custom data licenses that are lengthy and difficult to interpret. Because large-scale ecosystem mapping depends on combining datasets from many sources, ambiguous licensing can stall or invalidate integration efforts. The authors recommend that ecosystems researchers include explicit data license information, use standard licensing where possible, and, where data must be restricted, provide clear information about how to legally obtain access.

The issue also introduces methodological advances with direct applications in conservation and biosecurity. “A protocol for biodiversity-informed wildlife disease surveillance” describes a framework that integrates data on host biodiversity with sampling priorities for wildlife disease surveillance, drawing on host species distribution models and pathogen prevalence data where available. The approach makes adaptive sampling recommendations possible for researchers in the field, allowing surveillance effort to be steered toward locations and species where disease emergence risk is expected to be highest. Such biodiversity-informed surveillance is increasingly relevant as land-use change and wildlife trade alter contact patterns between wild hosts, domestic animals, and humans.

Theoretical ecology is represented by “Self-organized vegetation patterns promote persistence of plant–pollinator mutualisms under environmental stress.” The study explores how spatial self-organization, the process by which vegetation arranges itself into characteristic patterns such as those seen in arid ecosystems, may stabilize mutualistic communities. By structuring plant populations spatially, these self-organized patterns can potentially drive the persistence of plant-pollinator interactions even in environments under significant stress, offering a mechanistic explanation for how some mutualisms survive conditions that simpler models would predict to be fatal.

Applied conservation biology appears in a study from Ghana examining “Urban herbicide use threatens a non-target butterfly (Hypolimnas misippus) through direct toxicity and host plant stress.” The research documents how the increasing use of urban herbicides threatens the native mimic butterfly Hypolimnas misippus through two pathways: direct toxic exposure to the butterflies themselves and indirect harm via stress to their host plants. The finding highlights how chemical management of urban vegetation can cascade through food webs to affect non-target species, a concern that intersects with the journal’s pollution section.

Microbial ecology receives attention in “Climate change and planetary microbiome: Are we overlooking free-living amoebae in climate-microbiome dynamics?” An international group of authors argues that free-living amoebae, single-celled organisms that are frequently overlooked in discussions of ecosystems and the global microbiome, deserve greater recognition for the roles they play in planetary processes. The piece is a call for the research community to incorporate these organisms into climate-microbiome frameworks rather than treating the microbial world as synonymous with bacteria alone.

Rounding out the first issue, “Combining branching processes and Allee effects into an integral projection model to assess invasion risk” presents a new modeling tool trialled on silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix), an invasive species in the Upper Mississippi River system that is at risk of expanding into the Great Lakes. The model combines branching processes, which describe population growth and reproduction probabilistically, with Allee effects, the phenomenon by which population growth slows at low densities, within an integral projection model framework to assess invasion risk for potentially invasive species. Together, the seven papers and the Editorial sketch the journal’s intended scope: rigorous, technically grounded ecosystem science that is openly accessible and positioned to inform policy and management decisions worldwide. The Editorial and all articles in the first issue are freely available through PLOS Ecosystems.

Subject of Research: Launch of the open-access journal PLOS Ecosystems and the research in its first issue

Article Title: PLOS Ecosystems publishes its first issue

Article References: PLOS Ecosystems publishes its first issue. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: PLOS Ecosystems, biodiversity, ecosystems, open access, IPBES, science publishing, conservation, wildlife disease surveillance, invasive species, pollinators, climate change, data licensing

The timing of her reflection is deliberate. The seventeenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity is currently reviewing collective progress toward the framework’s 2030 goals, and the uncomfortable question hanging over those negotiations is whether current efforts are remotely sufficient. Larigauderie’s answer is that the bottleneck is no longer simply a shortage of data about species decline. Since the landmark 2019 Global Assessment, IPBES has produced the Nexus Assessment, the Transformative Change Assessment and the Business and Biodiversity Assessment, and together these documents trace an intellectual evolution: from cataloguing drivers of loss to understanding the interconnected systems, societal transformations and economic shifts that determine whether policy ambition becomes reality.

The first of her three priorities concerns what she calls the shift from sectors to systems. One of the central messages of the Nexus Assessment is that biodiversity can no longer be understood, or governed, in isolation from food, water, health and climate. These are interconnected components of complex social-ecological systems in which decisions made in one domain generate consequences, both intended and unintended, in the others. The technical examples are sobering. Large-scale tree planting, a flagship strategy for climate mitigation, can support carbon targets yet, if poorly designed, replace species-rich ecosystems with monoculture plantations that undermine biodiversity outright. Comparable trade-offs arise between food production, water management and ecosystem conservation, meaning that policies optimized for a single objective frequently erode others.

Translating that insight into usable science demands better integrated modelling, Larigauderie argues: approaches capable of representing interactions across sectors and identifying trade-offs and synergies before policy choices are locked in. But she is explicit that the challenge extends well beyond modelling. The Nexus Assessment also highlights the need to understand governance across sectors, the conditions under which actors cooperate, and how diverse knowledge systems and values can genuinely inform decision-making. Questions of participation, equity and whose voices are heard, she writes, are decisive in determining whether policies are legitimate and durable. Answering them requires close collaboration between ecologists, economists, political scientists, sociologists and public health researchers, a disciplinary span that few research institutions are currently structured to support.

The second priority is what she terms the science of transformative change. With the Transformative Change Assessment, IPBES has assembled compelling evidence that fundamental change is both necessary and possible, and its key contribution is diagnostic: transformative change requires addressing the underlying drivers of biodiversity loss, including the growing disconnection of societies from nature, the concentration of power and wealth, and the dominance of short-term individual and material priorities in public and private decision-making. These underlying drivers, the assessment contends, shape the institutions, incentives and values that ultimately determine biodiversity outcomes, which is why incremental environmental policy so often fails to bend the curve.

The scientific challenge, as Larigauderie frames it, lies in understanding how these drivers interact, why transformative pathways succeed in some contexts but not others, and how they can be sustained over time. The assessment draws on hundreds of examples from around the world and identifies recurring characteristics of successful transformations, yet it also exposes conspicuous gaps in knowledge. Researchers still know little about how governance coalitions emerge, how economic incentives interact with shifting social norms, or how institutions learn from failure. Closing those gaps, she argues, will require comparative research across countries and cultures, underpinned by far stronger collaboration between natural and social scientists than the field has historically achieved.

The third priority is the one most likely to unsettle traditional conservation circles: business. The Business and Biodiversity Assessment makes what Larigauderie calls a fundamental point, that every business depends on and impacts biodiversity, and therefore has the potential to become a positive agent of change. Biodiversity loss, in this framing, is not merely an environmental concern but an emerging systemic risk for companies, financial institutions and entire economies, which elevates it from a corporate-responsibility topic to a strategic priority essential for long-term resilience. That reframing carries real weight at a moment when central banks and regulators are beginning to treat nature-related risk with the seriousness once reserved for climate.

The technical agenda that follows is demanding. Developing robust methods to assess biodiversity impacts and dependencies across value chains is a major priority, but Larigauderie insists that measurement alone is not enough. Scientists also need a better understanding of how biodiversity-related risks propagate through financial systems, how investment decisions shape biodiversity outcomes, and how financial flows can be redirected toward nature-positive development. That includes working out how climate finance and agricultural investment can be aligned with biodiversity objectives rather than working at cross-purposes to them. Perhaps the greatest challenge, she writes, is not simply improving how biodiversity is measured, but developing the evidence and tools that make biodiversity a routine consideration in business strategy, capital allocation and financial decision-making, an opportunity she sees for collaboration between ecologists, economists, finance specialists and management scholars.

Taken together, the three assessments point to a coherent research programme for the coming decade: systems approaches that capture interactions across sectors and scales; a stronger science of transformative change that explains how institutions, incentives and values interact to shape societal change; and the evidence and methods needed to embed biodiversity within business, finance and investment decisions. None of these priorities fits neatly within existing disciplinary silos, which is precisely the point. The biodiversity crisis, on this reading, is not primarily a problem of ecological ignorance but of governance, economics and values, and the science needed to address it must be built accordingly.

Looking back on her twelve years leading the platform, Larigauderie expresses pride in the community IPBES has helped build: thousands of experts spanning disciplines, cultures and knowledge systems, working across boundaries that once separated institutions and fields. That community, she notes, depends on universities, research institutes, scientific societies and journals that provide space for new ideas, and she argues that a venue like PLOS Ecosystems can strengthen exactly the interdisciplinary capacity the assessments show is needed. Her parting message to researchers is blunt in its optimism: the science published today will become the evidence assessed tomorrow, and the scientists who produce it are not spectators to the biodiversity negotiations but participants in a shared endeavour to give decision makers the tools they need to accelerate action for nature and people.

Subject of Research: Scientific priorities for biodiversity action identified from a decade of IPBES assessments

Article Title: What science does biodiversity action still need? Lessons from a decade of IPBES

Article References: Larigauderie, A. (2026). What science does biodiversity action still need? Lessons from a decade of IPBES. PLOS Ecosystems, 1(1), e0000027. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pesy.0000027

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pesy.0000027

Keywords: IPBES, biodiversity, Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, transformative change, nexus assessment, business and biodiversity, social-ecological systems, conservation policy, sustainable finance, interdisciplinary research, Convention on Biological Diversity, ecosystem services

The scale of the undertaking reflects the urgency of the problem it addresses. Human pressures such as land-use change and the spread of exotic species are estimated to have pushed around one million species towards extinction, threatening the pollination, carbon storage, water purification and food production systems on which societies depend. Global frameworks, including the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, aim to halt these declines, but effective action demands a quantitative understanding of exactly how diversity translates into ecological performance. The new study follows the classification scheme of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, distinguishing ecosystem functions, the processes occurring within ecosystems, from ecosystem services, the contributions those processes make to human well-being, while treating carbon sequestration separately across land and sea because of its central role in climate regulation.

One of the study’s central findings concerns the shape of the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem performance. Ecologists have long debated whether adding species yields steadily increasing benefits, a linear relationship implying that every species, including rare ones, contributes meaningfully, or whether benefits plateau quickly, a saturating relationship suggesting widespread functional redundancy. Across 23 categories of functions and services, the team found that quadratic models best described 11 categories and linear models 9, with only two best fit by logarithmic curves. In other words, linear and saturating forms are almost equally common, and for many services the benefits of diversity continue to climb across the biodiversity gradients observed in the empirical literature. The authors argue that saturation limits have rarely been reached in the studies compiled, implying that functional redundancy may be systematically overestimated and that individual species contribute more uniquely than commonly assumed.

Where saturation does occur, the thresholds differ dramatically between realms. In freshwater systems, service delivery typically saturates at a median of roughly four species, with a median absolute deviation of two, whereas terrestrial systems require around 14 species and marine systems around 23. The researchers attribute this gradient to fundamental differences in ecological architecture: freshwater food webs tend to be dominated by generalists operating at relatively small scales, while marine systems, exemplified by coral reefs, combine vast spatial extent, high trophic complexity and pervasive mutualisms and co-evolutionary interactions that demand a larger species pool to sustain function. Marine ecosystems may also display low species multifunctionality, meaning individual services can be supported by a small subset of species, but maintaining the full portfolio of services requires high overall diversity.

To compare effect strengths across these different functional forms, the team calculated standardized effect sizes, using Fisher’s Z-transformed correlation coefficients for each of 1,959 datasets. The results were emphatic: higher biodiversity enhanced most functions and services, from carbon capture to food production, but the magnitude varied enormously. Regulation of air quality showed an effect size of essentially zero, while oceanic carbon sequestration registered a value of 1.48, by far the strongest response of any category examined. This exceptional sensitivity of oceanic blue carbon, a significant component of the global carbon cycle, suggests that marine carbon cycling, including phytoplankton productivity, microbial loop dynamics and the biological carbon pump, is under tight biological control linked to community composition and trophic structure. The authors caution, however, that oceanic sequestration is represented by only seven datasets in the database, compared with 154 for terrestrial sequestration, a critical knowledge gap that itself constitutes a call to action.

Not every service behaves the same way. Hazard regulation, the capacity of ecosystems to buffer floods, storms and erosion, showed weak overall sensitivity to biodiversity despite often displaying linear relationships in the functional-form analysis. The explanation lies in functional uniqueness: some services are delivered overwhelmingly by a few foundational species or ecosystem engineers. Sand dunes, for instance, are stabilized by one or two key shrub species that create a natural barrier against flooding and erosion, and adding further species does not necessarily improve that protective performance. Yet the wider community still matters, because the persistence of these foundational taxa depends on the ecological conditions that a diverse community maintains. The study connects this pattern to the concept of ecosystem-specific planetary boundaries, thresholds beyond which ecosystem functions can collapse, and proposes developing a typology of species and system traits to help conservationists identify in advance which systems are governed by uniqueness and which by redundancy.

Context proved decisive throughout the analysis. Using linear mixed-effects models, the team found that biodiversity effects generally strengthened with increasing spatial grain, consistent with beta-diversity effects in which spatial turnover in species composition enhances functional complementarity across sites. But the pattern reversed for specific services: contributions to hazard regulation, net primary productivity and biomass turnover all declined significantly at coarser scales, echoing forest studies where positive relationships at fine grains turn negative at broader ones. Ecosystem type also mattered, with biodiversity effects positive on average in freshwater systems, negative in marine systems and non-significant in terrestrial ones, though these averages concealed strong variation among service categories. Observational studies revealed modestly but statistically stronger effects than experiments, suggesting that small-scale, simplified experimental plots may underestimate the cumulative, context-dependent impacts of biodiversity loss that play out across real landscapes.

The synthesis then ventures beyond description into forecasting. Because the underlying literature is heavily biased towards developed countries, underrepresenting regions critical for global food production such as South America and Africa, the team built a heuristic modelling framework linking their biodiversity-ecosystem service relationships with projected biodiversity intactness under the IPCC’s Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. Applied to agricultural pest regulation, measured as the ratio of natural enemies to pests, a widely used proxy for top-down biological control, the model projects that pest regulation declines more severely under the fossil-fuel-driven SSP5 scenario than under the middle-of-the-road SSP2, with reductions forecast across North America, South America and Asia. Crucially, the declines are disproportionately concentrated in countries experiencing rapid population growth and low Human Development Index values, precisely the nations most reliant on local ecosystem services and least equipped to substitute pesticides or imports for lost natural pest control.

The implications reach well beyond agriculture. By quantifying where biodiversity loss will bite hardest, the framework gives planners a scientifically grounded basis for anticipating problems before they materialize, and the team has released model outputs and forecasts for all 23 service and function categories across five socioeconomic scenarios. The authors are candid about limitations: the projections assume that species loss is random with respect to functional importance, whereas if vulnerable species are also functionally critical, future service declines could be steeper than predicted. Progress, they argue, will require hybrid networks embedding experimental manipulations within long-term monitoring, hierarchical sampling to separate local, regional and landscape diversity contributions, and a new generation of field experiments designed explicitly to disentangle redundancy from uniqueness. What the synthesis establishes beyond reasonable doubt is that biodiversity is not a luxury of pristine wilderness but the operating infrastructure of a functioning planet, and that the richest communities, those closest to saturation thresholds never yet observed, are the ones humanity can least afford to lose.

Subject of Research: Global relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and services

Article Title: Biodiversity safeguards ecosystem services and functions worldwide

Article References: Moffett, E. R., Gayford, J. H., Chen, L., Morris, O. F., Shi, Y., Somekh, L., Stasik, N., Purvis, A., Woodward, G., & Pearse, W. D. (2026). Biodiversity safeguards ecosystem services and functions worldwide. Nature Ecology & Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-026-03200-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41559-026-03200-4

Keywords: biodiversity, ecosystem services, ecosystem functioning, carbon sequestration, blue carbon, pollination, pest regulation, IPBES, shared socioeconomic pathways, functional redundancy, marine ecosystems, global synthesis

Henrique Miguel Pereira, the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, who is based at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, and BIOPOLIS-CIBIO at the University of Porto, argues that humanity is not only losing the result of millions of years of evolution but also missing critical opportunities to tackle entangled societal and environmental challenges. These include climate change, the development of sustainable and fair agriculture, forestry and fisheries, and the effort to make cities more livable and healthy. Although a growing number of journals address sectoral slices of these issues, he writes, a truly interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary journal in ecosystems and biodiversity has been missing from the scientific landscape.

The technical ambition behind the new journal is striking. Rather than organizing content around traditional disciplinary boundaries such as botany, zoology, or oceanography, the editorial team structured the journal’s sections around the conceptual framework of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, known as IPBES. That framework, developed through a global scientific and policy consensus process, maps how direct and indirect drivers of change cascade through ecosystems to affect nature, nature’s contributions to people, and human well-being. By aligning journal sections with this architecture, PLOS Ecosystems is effectively building its editorial identity on the same conceptual scaffolding that underpins international biodiversity assessment and policy.

Four of the journal’s sections are dedicated to the major drivers of ecosystem change: Ecosystems and Land-use/Sea-use, Ecosystems and Climate, Ecosystems and Pollution, and Sustainable Use of Biodiversity. Pereira notes that the naming of the fourth section is deliberate, emphasizing the journal’s focus on finding solutions for the biodiversity crisis and its connection to the themes of the Convention on Biological Diversity, the international treaty that guides global conservation commitments. Two further sections address the understanding, conservation, restoration, and management of ecosystems themselves, one covering terrestrial systems and another covering freshwater and marine environments. A seventh section is devoted to Ecosystem Functions and Benefits, encompassing what scientists variously call ecosystem services or nature’s contributions to people, and an eighth examines Social-Ecological Interactions, exploring how people manage and affect ecosystems and how they perceive and experience biodiversity and its benefits.

The editorial leadership reflects the journal’s global scope. Pereira describes an interdisciplinary team of scientists leading the sections who come from all six inhabited continents, supported by a team of experienced Academic Editors providing detailed expertise across the broad journal scope. Recruitment is ongoing, and the launch editorial doubles as an open invitation for additional researchers to apply to join the editorial board, with the stated goal of building a diverse and representative body of editors. This geographic breadth matters for a field in which the majority of the planet’s biodiversity lies in the Global South while much of the publishing power has historically been concentrated in wealthy nations.

The first issue of the journal showcases the disciplinary and transdisciplinary breadth the editors are aiming for. It includes an Opinion paper by Anne Larigauderie, who served as executive secretary of IPBES for more than a decade, from the platform’s inception until recently. In her piece, titled ‘What science does biodiversity action still need? Lessons from a decade of IPBES,’ she examines the major research gaps at the science-policy interface, with particular attention to the knowledge needed to address what policymakers call the implementation gap, the persistent distance between international biodiversity commitments and their delivery on the ground. The debut issue also features a range of other Opinion and Research Articles spanning topics from wildlife disease surveillance to the modelling of invasion risk and the impacts of herbicide use in urban areas in Ghana, a spread that illustrates how ecological research increasingly intersects with public health, trade, agriculture, and urban planning.

Underlying the editorial vision is a pointed critique of how biodiversity science has been published and shared. Pereira emphasizes that open science is particularly important for biodiversity and ecosystem research because most of the world’s biodiversity is located in low-income countries, yet historically many of the studies describing it appeared in journals that researchers from those countries could not access. Beyond paywalls, the underlying biodiversity data and the analysis code were frequently unavailable, making it difficult for local scientists and managers to verify, reuse, or build upon published findings. This situation, he notes, has begun to change in recent years with the rise of open science journals and platforms for sharing biodiversity data, but the costs of publishing in the field’s most prestigious outlets often remain prohibitive for many scientists.

PLOS Ecosystems has been established to allow all researchers, with the editorial stressing the word ‘all,’ to publish their work in a broad-impact journal. PLOS is working to make open access funding more equitable and sustainable, an effort the editorial links directly to the journal’s mission. In addition, the journal’s commitment to making data and code public goes beyond other initiatives in the field, according to Pereira, with the aim of making science truly accessible and empowering ecosystem and biodiversity managers around the world. For practitioners working in national parks, fisheries agencies, or municipal planning departments, the practical significance is clear: studies published in the journal can be read, scrutinized, and applied without subscription barriers, and the evidence behind them can be independently examined.

The journal arrives at a moment when the science-policy machinery around biodiversity is accelerating. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework has set nations ambitious targets for protecting and restoring ecosystems, and mechanisms such as IPBES exist to ensure those commitments rest on the best available evidence. Yet the launch editorial makes the case that the knowledge system feeding this machinery remains fragmented, with climate scientists, conservation biologists, agricultural researchers, and social scientists often publishing past one another in specialized venues. A journal explicitly designed around the IPBES framework, and around the interface between science, policy, and society, represents an attempt to rewire that plumbing at the level of scientific publishing itself.

Whether PLOS Ecosystems can become the forum its founders envision, a place where scientists working across a wide range of fields interact with a broad readership that extends beyond academia to practitioners and decision-makers, will depend on the research community it hopes to attract. But the premise of the launch is unambiguous: the biodiversity crisis is not a problem any single discipline can solve, and the systems for communicating science about it should not be siloed either. As the editorial concludes, the loss of biodiversity means losing millions of years of evolutionary history, and with it the chance to build sustainable agriculture, fair fisheries, climate resilience, and healthier cities. The first issue of PLOS Ecosystems is now online, open to everyone, as a first step toward changing how that story is told.

Subject of Research: Launch of the interdisciplinary open-access journal PLOS Ecosystems for ecosystem and biodiversity sciences

Article Title: PLOS Ecosystems : An interdisciplinary journal for ecosystem and biodiversity sciences

Article References: Pereira, H. M. (2026). PLOS Ecosystems: An interdisciplinary journal for ecosystem and biodiversity sciences. PLOS Ecosystems, 1(1), e0000031. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pesy.0000031

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pesy.0000031

Keywords: PLOS Ecosystems, biodiversity, ecosystems, open access, IPBES, conservation, science policy, ecosystem services, social-ecological systems, Convention on Biological Diversity, open science, Henrique Miguel Pereira

The study builds on the nexus perspective, which treats biodiversity, water, food, health, and climate as coupled systems rather than separate policy silos. Within this framing, interlinkages describe influences among elements, interdependencies arise when one element depends on another to function, synergies occur when improvement in one element enhances another, and trade-offs occur when improvement in one worsens another. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified climate change as a threat multiplier that deepens existing vulnerabilities in societies shaped by inequality and institutional fragility. Intact ecosystems moderate climatic extremes, regulate hydrological cycles, sustain food production, and protect human health, while degradation weakens these buffering functions and heightens exposure. The authors argue that recognizing this interdependence has not yet produced sufficiently integrated climate action, because mitigation pathways remain misaligned with long-term temperature goals and adaptation measures often lack institutional coherence.

The comparative results reveal three striking patterns. First, ecosystem-centered and demand-side options exhibit the strongest cross-nexus synergies. Agroecology, wetland conservation and restoration, forest-based practices, coastal and marine ecosystem restoration, and sustainable healthy diets show predominantly positive biodiversity-food interactions alongside consistent gains in water regulation and health. Increasing soil organic carbon shows a similar profile, although the permanence of sequestration remains a recognized constraint. Second, infrastructure- and technology-centered mitigation options display more differentiated outcomes. Offshore wind power and land-based solar photovoltaics deliver clear mitigation and health gains through decarbonization and reduced air pollution, but their biodiversity and food-system interactions vary with marine ecosystem disturbance and competition for land. Third, system-enabling options such as multi-hazard early warning systems and reductions in short-lived climate pollutants generate mediated but important effects, with global cooperation for finance and technology functioning as a structural enabler across all domains.

Across every category, trade-offs cluster around land competition, biomass demand, tenure and access rights, affordability, and distributional equity. The authors emphasize that mixed outcomes do not imply net failure; rather, they reveal structural tensions within socio-ecological systems that must be governed rather than ignored. The analysis then applies a second evaluative layer, scoring each option for compatibility with Earth System Justice, a framework that treats distributive equity, procedural fairness, intergenerational responsibility, and recognition of diverse knowledge systems as constitutive elements of planetary governance. Agroecology, forest-based practices, coastal restoration, and sustainable healthy diets score highest on both justice compatibility and nexus governance synergy, while solar and wind power score moderately, reflecting the fact that distributive outcomes hinge on siting, tenure, and benefit-sharing design rather than on technological maturity itself.

To test these mechanisms in the real world, the team traced five enabling-condition cases in depth. In Andhra Pradesh, India, community-managed natural farming reported enhanced agrobiodiversity, improved groundwater recharge, increased dietary diversity, and reduced agrochemical exposure. Agronomic technique alone does not explain these gains. The Rythu Sadhikara Samstha platform connected state agencies with self-help groups, farmer networks, and civil society organizations, decentralizing authority while maintaining coordination, and enabling farmer-led experimentation through field schools. Women farmers and marginal groups were actively included, and synergies stabilized precisely where distributive equity, recognition of local knowledge, and cross-sectoral coordination converged. The case demonstrates that institutional architecture, not merely soil science, determines whether ecological practices translate into system-wide benefits.

Indigenous-led REDD+ initiatives in the Brazilian Amazon tell a parallel story about tenure security. Documented outcomes include avoided deforestation, habitat protection, strengthened watershed function, and reduced fire-related health burdens, with food systems benefiting through continued access to non-timber forest products. Where customary land rights were formally recognized and indigenous institutions retained authority, mitigation aligned with livelihood security. The Amazon Fund linked Indigenous Peoples and local communities, non-governmental organizations, and state agencies within a multi-level governance architecture, while participatory mapping and satellite monitoring integrated scientific tools with indigenous knowledge. Crucially, where communities were treated as beneficiaries rather than rights-holders, conflict and instability followed. Carbon finance without recognition justice, the authors conclude, does not secure durable cross-nexus outcomes.

Further evidence comes from Kenya, where the Mikoko Pamoja initiative links mangrove rehabilitation to community development. Carbon revenues finance education and water infrastructure, and the project operates through community-state-donor co-management with transparent revenue governance and negotiated trade-offs between conservation and livelihoods. In Medellín, Colombia, urban green corridors expanded tree cover, improved air quality, reduced heat exposure, and delivered measurable mental and cardiovascular health benefits, though spatial inequities in access persisted and green gentrification posed risks to vulnerable populations. In Wayanad, India, the revitalization of local diets and health traditions revived wild edible species, strengthened food sovereignty, and improved dietary quality through more than five hundred training sessions connecting indigenous knowledge holders with scientific institutions. By contrast, the Kachung Forest Project in Uganda serves as a contested counter-case: despite formal Clean Development Mechanism certification, contested degradation baselines, restricted access to land, fuelwood, and grazing areas, and limited recognition of customary resource use undermined its legitimacy, showing that carbon accounting cannot compensate for weak procedural inclusion.

The governance analysis identifies two complementary institutional models. Polycentric governance distributes authority across multiple, overlapping centers of decision-making, supporting experimentation, adaptive learning, and context-sensitive responses, with redundancy across centers enhancing resilience. Yet decentralization without coordination may reproduce sectoral silos and existing power asymmetries, or enable elite capture. Nexus governance addresses this weakness by making explicit the interdependencies across biodiversity, water, food, health, and climate, resting on five principles from the IPBES Nexus Assessment: integrative and transdisciplinary framings, inclusive engagement, explicit attention to justice and accountability, cross-scale coordination, and adaptive, reflexive governance. Financial and technological arrangements act as structural filters across all options, with limited concessional finance, high debt burdens, and risk-averse investment restricting implementation in many low- and middle-income settings, while harmful subsidies for fossil fuels, agriculture, forestry, and fisheries divert resources from renewable and circular pathways.

The authors are careful to acknowledge limitations. The study uses ordinal scoring and qualitative mechanism tracing rather than statistical causal identification, and cannot estimate average treatment effects or universal rankings. Evidence coverage varies across options, regions, and institutional settings, and the expert assessment did not employ blinded independent coding or formal sensitivity analysis. The findings should be read as evidence-supported comparative tendencies rather than deterministic predictions, and the authors call for future research using preregistered systematic review, independent parallel coding, and quantitative sensitivity analysis. Even so, the central inference stands: technical potential alone cannot explain uneven co-benefits across connected systems. Durable outcomes become plausible when institutions coordinate across sectors and scales, distribute benefits and burdens fairly, enable meaningful participation, respect plural knowledge systems, and maintain accountable long-term finance. Climate responses, the study argues, should be evaluated through both their direct effects and the institutional conditions governing their persistence, aligning ecological interdependence with rights, responsibilities, and public accountability.

Subject of Research: Nexus governance and Earth System Justice conditions shaping co-benefits of climate response options across biodiversity, water, food, and health

Article Title: Enabling climate action: A nexus approach for delivering co-benefits across biodiversity, water, food, and health

Article References: Singh, P. K., Gupta, H., Díaz-José, J., McElwee, P. D., Tirado, M. C., Cherubini, F., Duchková, H., Llope, M., Vale, M. M., Khan, S., Ito, A., Hori, M., Eriksen, S. H., Tiwari, L., Phang, S. C., Mason-D’Croz, D., Xu, X., van Huysen, T., Herrero, M., … Smith, P. (2026). Enabling climate action: A nexus approach for delivering co-benefits across biodiversity, water, food, and health. iScience, 29(11), Article 117734. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2026.117734

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2026.117734

Keywords: climate change, nexus approach, biodiversity, water, food security, public health, IPBES, Earth System Justice, governance, agroecology, REDD+, indigenous knowledge

The numbers behind the study’s setting are stark. Colombia extracted roughly 69.3 million tons of coal in 2023, declining to 59.3 million tons in 2024, and La Jagua de Ibirico sits at the heart of that story. The municipality’s population surged by 138 percent between 2005 and 2020 as open-pit operations expanded, even as production in the municipality itself fell from 15.9 million tons in 2012 to 10.9 million tons in 2020. The paradox the researchers set out to examine is precisely this: how can a region plan an energy transition while its economy, institutions, and identities remain welded to the export of a fuel the world is supposed to abandon?

The team’s environmental forensics are unambiguous. Using official forest and hydrographic data from Colombia’s IDEAM and IGAC institutes, delineated against high-resolution Planet satellite imagery in a GIS environment, they found that approximately 315 hectares of forest cover disappeared within the La Jagua mining area between 1990 and 2022, with another 138 hectares lost around the Calenturitas mine. The losses concentrated along riparian corridors, including the Tucuy River, where vegetation once buffered waterways and regulated seasonal flows. Farmers interviewed for the study reported that creeks which once ran year-round now flow only in the rainy season, and that freshwater turtles, native fish, and amphibians have largely vanished from waters they remember as abundant.

Air quality data tell a parallel story of slow-motion harm. Historical records of total suspended particles from the La Palmita station between 2001 and 2010 hovered just below Colombia’s national annual limit of 100 micrograms per cubic meter, while the Boquerón station exceeded that threshold in 2008 and 2009. In 2007, the Ministry of Environment classified sections of the Cesar Mining Corridor as environmental pollution zones, and in 2010 Boquerón was formally declared uninhabitable. Yet as of 2024, a significant proportion of households remained in place, caught in a resettlement process stalled by administrative procedures, budget constraints, and regulatory negotiations. Residents described what researchers call double exposure: simultaneous contact with particulate contamination and institutional neglect. One community leader put it bluntly: We are stuck in the middle, contaminated, forgotten, and silenced.

What distinguishes this study is its refusal to stop at environmental measurement. The researchers deployed a framework known as the plural valuation of nature, aligned with the IPBES Values Assessment, which holds that ecosystems carry economic, social, ecological, cultural, and spiritual meanings simultaneously, and that reducing them to monetary terms erases the very values that make transition pathways legitimate. They surveyed 101 residents, conducted 21 semi-structured interviews across institutional, labor, and community groups, and asked participants to score five economic sectors, mining, agriculture, livestock, tourism, and commerce, across four dimensions: economic contribution, social well-being, ecological sustainability, and cultural compatibility.

The resulting valuation heatmap exposes a contradiction that conventional cost-benefit analysis would miss entirely. Mining scored highest in the economic dimension, with a mean of 3.57 on a five-point scale, reflecting real dependence on jobs, transport, and services. But it scored lowest in the ecological dimension at 2.31, and a paired Wilcoxon signed-rank test across 101 complete pairs confirmed the gap was statistically robust, with a mean difference of 1.27 points and a p-value of 1.79 times ten to the minus nine. Residents associated mining with respiratory illness, unequal benefit distribution, and weakened social trust. Agriculture, by contrast, earned its highest score in the cultural dimension at 4.07, tied to ancestral farming knowledge and food sovereignty, while tourism scored highest on ecological and cultural grounds despite weak current income potential.

Perceptions of decline were strikingly convergent. Soil degradation was cited by 81 percent of respondents, biodiversity loss by 73 percent, water deterioration by 67 percent, food insecurity by 61 percent, and cultural or emotional rupture by 47 percent. Farmers described soil that no longer breathes, where composting and crop rotation have lost their effectiveness and fallow land fails to recover. Women in Boquerón and La Palmita reported heavier domestic burdens hauling water from distant sources. Older residents, particularly women, described the painful erosion of ecological knowledge transmission, from identifying medicinal plants to reading seasonal cues, as planting cycles grew unpredictable and younger generations drifted from the land.

The study’s authors are careful not to romanticize the alternatives. Agriculture in La Jagua de Ibirico is a constrained pathway, limited by the very degradation mining caused: compacted soils, water scarcity, and diminished productivity that will require sustained technical and institutional support to reverse. Tourism is aspirational rather than immediately viable, dependent on air-quality improvement, riparian restoration, infrastructure, and security. The analytical point is subtler and more consequential: plural valuation reveals the direction communities want to travel, even when the road has not yet been built. Ignoring those non-economic values, the researchers argue, reproduces extractivist logic under a green banner, a critique increasingly aimed at transition policies across the Global South where corporate actors have appropriated transition narratives while extraction continues.

Gender emerged as a quietly powerful thread in the findings. Among the 101 respondents, 56 women and 45 men, exploratory chi-square tests found statistically significant associations between sex and both the economic and social valuation of mining. Qualitatively, women were especially vocal on health impacts, water quality, and caregiving burdens, articulating relational and care-based values that shaped deliberation. The authors suggest that future plural valuation exercises in extractive territories adopt gender-sensitive designs to capture these differentiated experiences systematically, rather than leaving them as anecdotal color in participatory workshops.

The deeper lesson radiating from this Colombian coal town is procedural, not merely technical. The Boquerón resettlement saga shows that legal recognition of harm means little without community power over timelines, criteria, and compensation, a textbook case of what environmental justice scholars call procedural justice failure. Residents have responded with community-led air monitoring, participatory mapping of lost territories, and youth-driven documentaries and podcasts documenting environmental injustice. Their articulated demands, compensation for health harms, investment in agroecology and community tourism, legal recognition of territorial practices, and youth training, sketch a transition measured in healing rather than megawatts. As one interviewee told the researchers: The land is wounded, and so are we. Transition means healing both. If the global energy transition is to be just anywhere, this study suggests, it must begin by listening to places like La Jagua de Ibirico, where the invoice for coal was paid long before anyone asked who would collect it.

Subject of Research: Plural valuation of nature and environmental justice in post-extractive transition pathways in a coal-dependent Colombian municipality

Article Title: Plural valuation of nature and environmental justice in post-extractive transitions: The case of La Jagua de Ibirico, Colombia

Article References: Regino Vergara, J., Rincón Ruíz, A., Mejía Brito, A., & Banda Pérez, A. (2026). Plural valuation of nature and environmental justice in post-extractive transitions: The case of La Jagua de Ibirico, Colombia. Heliyon, 12(15), Article e45538. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45538

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45538

Keywords: energy transition, coal mining, Colombia, environmental justice, plural valuation, post-extractivism, air quality, forest loss, participatory research, IPBES, just transition, La Jagua de Ibirico