The urgency behind the paper stems from the escalating ecological crisis and the growing recognition that the way humanity values nature shapes how it is protected or destroyed. People value nature in profoundly different ways: instrumentally, for the material benefits it provides; intrinsically, for its existence independent of any human observer; and relationally, through the meanings, identities and social bonds that arise from human–nature interactions. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, emphasized in its 2022 Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuation of Nature that most current valuation processes capture only a narrow slice of these values, typically monetary and quantitative ones, which can produce environmental injustices and conflicts while ignoring worldviews of indigenous peoples and local communities.

To translate plural valuation into practice, researchers have identified four values-centered leverage points for transformative change: recognizing the diverse values of nature in valuation methods; embedding those values into decision-making; reforming policies, rights and regulations to internalize nature’s values; and shifting the deeper societal norms, beliefs and goals that underpin how people relate to nature and to each other. Drawing on leverage point theory popularized by Donella Meadows, the authors note that these intervention points cascade in depth—shallower points are easier to act on but yield less change, while deeper points are harder to activate but hold far greater transformative potential when engaged.

The new perspective, the product of two expert workshops hosted by the Open Universiteit in 2022 and 2023, systematically maps how citizen science can strengthen interventions at each of these leverage points. At the first point, recognizing diverse values, citizen science initiatives such as Drinkable Rivers, Curieuze Neuzen in Belgium, and the Dutch Network Ecological Monitoring demonstrate that the questions citizens ask and the species or landscapes they monitor often reflect deeply held values and concerns. Because participants are drawn from varied localities, socio-economic backgrounds and identities, their involvement can widen the spectrum of values that enter formal valuation, though the authors caution that environmental citizen science remains biased toward quantitative data collection, overrepresenting instrumental and intrinsic values while leaving relational values largely implicit.

Measuring relational values—attachments to places, species and nature in general—requires methodological innovation. The researchers point to emerging approaches such as citizens’ written letters to trees, micronarratives and behavioral data on species preferences, which can be combined with ecological measurements to illuminate socio-ecological interactions. They also flag a fundamental trade-off: methods capable of capturing rich detail about people’s values tend to be more complex and time-consuming, reducing the volume of data collected, while high-volume approaches may flatten the very diversity of values that plural valuation seeks to reveal.

At the second leverage point, embedding valuation into inclusive decision-making, the evidence is striking. Citizen-collected air quality data from the Louisiana Bucket Brigade in the United States and the Samen Meten program run by the Dutch national public health institute have shaped governmental policy agendas. In Europe, citizen observatories deliberately link citizens, scientists and decision-makers in shared monitoring of local environments. The authors document cases where citizen science has even entered the courtroom: plastic pollution data gathered by volunteers contributed to a petrochemical company being found liable, and species observations by Swedish citizens have been used in environmental court cases. Participation also reshapes personal decisions, with studies showing that citizen scientists adopt more biodiversity-friendly gardening practices and strengthen their personal connection to nature—effects that ripple outward through the communities and social networks these initiatives create.

Yet the path is not without obstacles. Doubts about the quality of citizen-generated data among scientists and policymakers, persistent power dynamics in decision-making circles, and a lack of agency, skills or resources among decision-makers all constrain uptake. Studies further reveal a persistent demographic skew: citizen science participants tend to be white, highly educated, older and more affluent, which narrows the knowledge produced and limits environmental justice. At the third, deeper leverage point of institutional reform, the authors highlight structural embedding efforts such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s agreement to involve citizens in knowledge co-creation and the more4nature initiative, which seeks to institutionalize collaboration between citizen science projects and authorities responsible for policy implementation and monitoring. But they also warn that institutionalization carries risks: when data flow into analytical pipelines, ties with the volunteers who collected them can weaken, and the sense of pride and emotional enrichment that motivates citizen scientists can erode if their knowledge becomes an untraceable instrument.

The deepest leverage point—shifting societal norms and paradigms—is where citizen science may hold its most profound potential. Empirical studies show that participation strengthens place attachment, nature connectedness and nature-noticing over both short and long timescales. Communities formed around monitoring projects build shared values and collective action, and so-called citizen science ambassadors inspire pro-environmental attitudes in their social circles. The authors caution, however, that it is methodologically difficult to distinguish values genuinely transformed by participation from values participants already held, and some longitudinal studies find no attitude change because participants began with strongly positive orientations toward nature. Measuring such shifts demands new approaches that explicitly track emotional connectedness and underlying norms.

From this analysis the team distills three overarching recommendations. First, recognize and measure: relational values must be made explicit in citizen science design, supported by new quantitative and qualitative methods, since they are both key motivations for participation and outcomes strengthened by it. Second, embrace diversity: plural valuation calls for plural publics, meaning the full variety of citizen science formats—from top-down governmental programs to grassroots community-led efforts—should be cultivated, with flexible roles that allow citizens, scientists and policymakers to grow into varied responsibilities. Third, pursue structural integration: case-by-case policy engagement is growing, but lasting change requires structural funding, long-term collaborations, storytelling that showcases how citizen science has informed decisions, and open science principles that ease institutionalization into policy processes.

The authors conclude that uniting citizen science and plural valuation is not merely an academic win–win but a necessary foundation for inclusive, effective environmental action and conservation. As governments worldwide struggle to meet biodiversity targets amid widening distrust in institutions, the perspective suggests a practical and democratizing pathway: the millions of volunteers already counting birds, measuring rivers and sensing air pollution are not just collecting data—they are articulating, practicing and fostering a richer, more plural vision of what nature is worth, and in doing so, they may be pulling the deepest levers of transformative change.

Subject of Research: Integrating citizen science with plural valuation of nature to leverage transformative change

Article Title: Uniting citizen science and plural valuation: Potential for leveraging transformative change

Article References: Verploegen, H., Dyke, A. J., Ganzevoort, W., Hugé, J., Jacobs, S., Neuteleers, S., Prats López, M., Verschuuren, B., & Wehn, U. (2026). Uniting citizen science and plural valuation: Potential for leveraging transformative change. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02458-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02458-z

Keywords: citizen science, plural valuation, transformative change, relational values, environmental policy, IPBES, leverage points, biodiversity, nature connectedness, environmental justice, Uniting, citizen

The evidence for failure at scale is sobering. Individual projects frequently succeed: a meta-analysis cited in the review found that conservation interventions have produced measurable positive outcomes for species and ecosystems, and local communities in many regions have benefited from collaborative approaches to managing wildlife. Yet the aggregate picture documented by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, shows continued decline across most taxa and biomes. The review summarises the arithmetic bluntly: the sum of biodiversity gains within conservation projects has been smaller than losses across the rest of the world’s surface. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework responds by calling for restoring 30 percent of degraded ecosystems, conserving 30 percent of land and sea by 2030, halting extinctions, halving food waste and removing harmful incentives, all at an estimated cost of roughly US$200 billion per year. Thomas does not dispute the value of these targets but questions whether scaling up place-based protection can ever deliver a planetary turnaround.

The central technical problem the review identifies is leakage, the displacement of environmental pressure from protected locations to unprotected ones. When farmland is de-intensified, rewilded or abandoned for conservation, food production in that location falls, but demand for food does not. Production typically shifts elsewhere, often to regions with higher biodiversity or weaker environmental governance, and the review notes that leakage can in principle exceed 100 percent, producing a net global loss. The same dynamic applies to fisheries, where restrictions under one jurisdiction push fishing effort into other waters, other species or aquaculture; one cited study found that spatial restrictions inadvertently doubled the carbon footprint of Norway’s mackerel fleet. Because trade networks are diffuse and biodiversity is distributed unevenly, the magnitude of biodiversity leakage is difficult to quantify, but the mechanism itself undermines the assumption that protecting land locally equates to protecting nature globally.

Geography compounds the leakage problem. Under the Convention on Biological Diversity, commitments are devolved to nation states, so each signatory aims to conserve roughly 30 percent of its own territory. The globally efficient solution, Thomas argues, would look very different: considerably more than 30 percent of species-rich, endemic-rich countries such as Indonesia and Madagascar, and far less of most north-temperate nations. Studies of conservation prioritisation show that when nations plan independently they protect nationally rare species and sites that may not be threatened globally, so the total biodiversity secured is substantially lower than under globally coordinated prioritisation. Conservation prioritisation software and hotspot approaches championed by organisations such as Conservation International can identify where the maximum biodiversity can be conserved in the minimum area, and they have worked well in countries like Madagascar, but politics, not science, limits their global application.

Beneath these distributional problems lies the deeper causal hierarchy. IPBES identifies land and sea use change and direct exploitation of organisms as the top two direct drivers of biodiversity loss, but the review insists these are themselves consequences of indirect drivers, principally what and how much humanity eats. Global population is projected to rise by roughly a further quarter this century, while per capita intakes of calories, protein, fat and especially meat and dairy continue to climb. Around 30 percent of the Earth’s ice-free land surface is already devoted to meat and dairy production, including feed crops, against 9 percent for plants eaten directly by people. Human appropriation of the planet’s annual photosynthesis is forecast to reach between 27 and 44 percent by 2050 depending on agricultural trajectories. Since people must eat and that food must be produced somewhere, Thomas characterises food as the most intractable of the indirect drivers and therefore the proper first target of biodiversity mitigation.

The good news, the review stresses, is that a portfolio of social and technological transformations capable of relieving that pressure already exists. Demand-side measures include dietary shifts toward plant-rich and alternative-protein diets, halving food waste, reforming economic norms that reward growth in consumption over wellbeing, improving equity so that consumption is distributed more fairly, and removing perverse subsidies and incentives. Supply-side measures include plant-based and precision-fermented meat and dairy alternatives, cultivated meat, microbial protein grown on food waste and agro-industrial by-products, and even emerging approaches that synthesise carbohydrates directly from carbon dioxide and energy. None of these alone is sufficient, and it is unclear which combinations will prevail, but the review argues that together they could progressively reduce pressure on land and seas during the second half of the twenty-first century and, if supported and scaled, virtually eliminate food-related drivers of biodiversity decline within a century, allowing long-term ecosystem recovery.

Critically, this technological and social transformation must precede any wholesale shift to extensive farming. Organic systems produce roughly 20 to 25 percent less food per hectare than intensive agriculture, and the review warns that expanding cropland and pasture by that margin to compensate would be catastrophically damaging to global biodiversity. Wildlife-friendly and regenerative approaches become globally viable only once total production pressure has fallen, at which point remaining farmland could be de-intensified, agrochemicals largely removed and pollutants and welfare concerns addressed. The review also cautions that land released from food production must not simply be converted to biomass monocultures, plantation forestry or urban expansion, which would cancel the gains; overarching policies are needed to ensure that wins in one sector are not offset by losses in another. Importantly, this mitigation framing does not apply to the existing mitigation hierarchy of avoid, minimise, restore and offset, which Thomas classifies as adaptation because it manages the consequences of consumption rather than consumption itself.

On the adaptation side, the review argues that conventional conservation’s fixation on restoring historical baselines sets itself up to fail. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is already higher than at any time in roughly three million years, altering plant growth, carbon-nitrogen stoichiometry and climate in ways that will persist for tens of thousands of years. Species compositions have already shifted in most communities and will continue to shift regardless of conservation action, even inside protected areas. Instead of equating adaptation with resistance, Thomas endorses flexible decision frameworks such as Resist-Accept-Direct, developed for US national parks, and its generalised Facilitate-Accept-Resist variant. Managers would explicitly choose, case by case, whether to facilitate adaptive change, for example by enabling range shifts and novel community combinations; to accept change without intervention; or to resist change, reserved for situations where whole species are endangered or an irreplaceable ecosystem service is at stake. Facilitation and acceptance should normally come first, with resistance deployed surgically rather than as default strategy.

The review’s institutional conclusion is that the Convention on Biological Diversity should reorganise itself into parallel mitigation and adaptation work streams, mirroring the relationship between the IPCC and UNFCCC in climate policy, and drawing expertise from the FAO, trade bodies and others who govern the indirect drivers. It points out that biodiversity credits, no net loss rules and biodiversity net gain schemes, however well intentioned, risk enabling continued consumption growth and generating further leakage unless the underlying drivers are constrained. Traditional protected-area conservation will remain necessary, but it cannot substitute for mitigation. Recent biodiversity trends, the review concludes, cannot be halted or reversed at planetary scale unless the production and consumption causes of environmental change are recognised, reduced and replaced, and that will not happen by chance: it requires deliberate institutional redesign and political will on a scale conservation has never yet mobilised.

Subject of Research: Mitigation and adaptation strategies for halting and reversing global biodiversity decline by addressing the human consumption drivers of environmental change

Article Title: Mitigation and adaptation strategies to reverse biodiversity decline

Article References: Thomas, C. D. (2026). Mitigation and adaptation strategies to reverse biodiversity decline. BMC Environmental Science, 3(1), Article 19. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44329-026-00059-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44329-026-00059-5

Keywords: biodiversity, conservation, mitigation, adaptation, food systems, leakage, Convention on Biological Diversity, IPBES, cellular agriculture, dietary change, protected areas, Kunming-Montreal