The research, led by Axel Prestes Dürrnagel of RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau together with colleagues from the University of Augsburg, the Federal University of Rondônia, and the Peace Academy Rhineland-Palatinate, is based on a qualitative case study design. The team conducted 114 interviews, participant observation, and a photo-based approach over eight weeks of fieldwork across three visits between March 2024 and April 2025. Rather than simply documenting the well-known drivers of deforestation—cattle ranching expansion, illegal land sales, and population growth—the study set out to understand how different actors and institutions interact to shape territorial governance and land use in the reserve, and how these governance arrangements might still serve as a catalyst for transformative change, defined as fundamental, system-wide shifts in views, structures, and practices.

The reserve’s history is inseparable from the man it honors. Chico Mendes, the land rights activist and environmentalist who led the rubber tappers’ non-violent demonstrations and roadblocks known as empates, was assassinated by a cattle rancher in 1988. Two years after his death, the reserve was created as Brazil’s second extractive reserve, spanning seven municipalities and covering 970,570 hectares. The idea had been formulated at the first national meeting of rubber tappers in 1985: instead of fragmenting the forest into individual private properties, as was common during agrarian land reform, extractive reserves would be continuous territories safeguarding traditional communities’ access to natural resources. The model represented a landmark alliance between rubber tappers and Indigenous peoples as the united movement of the Forest Peoples.

Technically, the CMER operates under a distinctive property rights regime. The land belongs to the federal government and cannot be sold. Through long-term concessions formalized in a Contract for the Grant of Real Rights of Use, use rights are contracted to associations and local communities, which must comply with the Utilization Plan—a chapter of the Management Plan that sets binding rules for land and resource use. The socio-spatial unit is the colocação, the family landholding measured in estradas de seringa, forest pathways alongside rubber trees, each equivalent to 100 hectares. According to the Utilization Plan, each colocação should have at least two such streets, or 200 hectares. Families may clear small patches of primary forest for subsistence farming and small-scale animal raising, but complementary activities may occupy no more than 10 percent of the colocação and never exceed 30 hectares. ICMBio, the federal agency formally managing the reserve, is responsible for monitoring compliance.

That monitoring, the study finds, is where the model begins to crack. The Management Plan, drafted in 2006, is outdated and largely ignored. As one ICMBio official told the researchers: It does not describe the reality of the reserve. No one even reads the Management Plan. It is supposed to be the constitution of the reserve, but no one even uses it. Under-equipped staff and limited institutional capacity across the reserve’s vast extent forced a focus on short-term surveillance rather than long-term strategy. Residents describe embargoes on illegally deforested land that are never followed up, allowing offenders to return, burn the area, and raise cattle as if they had never been fined. Meanwhile, the reserve is administered by seven municipalities with competing political interests, and during the run-up to the October 2024 municipal elections, candidates often held positions in associations and syndicates, with local community coordinators using their authority to sway voters.

The market dimension proves equally decisive. The long-term decline in rubber prices pushed extractivists toward cattle ranching as an alternative income source. As one long-term resident explained: Then it went down, and I have to sell very cheaply. I have to look elsewhere. Where did the extractivists look? They looked at cattle. It’s what’s making money, and that’s what people are going to do. The photo-based interviews revealed a striking contradiction: residents associate extensive cattle ranching primarily with bad reputation, yet also with development and progress. Keeping cattle is often described as a savings account, offering immediate financial returns through the sale of a calf, unlike seasonal crops. Cattle prices have since declined—a weaned calf that once sold for R$2,300 now fetches R$1,000—and climate change-driven droughts are eroding profitability further as pastures wither and feed must be purchased.

Yet the study also documents genuine catalysts for change emerging from vertical cooperation with external actors. A partnership with the French company Veja, which buys natural rubber at a subsidized price, has quadrupled the effective rubber price: for cooperative members following certain guidelines, the commercial value of R$3.50 per kilo is supplemented by R$11.50 in payments for environmental services, totaling R$15.00 per kilo. More than 500 families in the municipality of Xapuri alone benefit from this arrangement, and many inhabitants have reengaged in rubber tapping. Agroforestry systems—mixtures of Brazil nut trees, fruit trees, industrial trees, and perennial cash crops that reproduce the diversity of natural ecosystems—were associated in the photo-based interviews even more strongly than cattle with progress and prosperity. One inhabitant who started an agroforest system two decades ago described it as one of the best things I have started, generating income for many years without constant replanting. Research in the eastern Amazon suggests fruit and horticulture products can generate 1,300 percent more income per hectare than cattle, though remote areas still lack the storage, processing, and supply chain infrastructure needed to overcome cattle’s dominance.

Civil society, the third institutional realm, is undergoing profound changes that undermine the reserve’s collective defenses. Population growth within the reserve means that where one family once lived, there are now often two, three, or four, while the 30-hectare limit for complementary activities remains constant regardless of how many families share a colocação. Some properties interpret the rules differently, with 12 families deforesting 24 hectares on a single plot. An influx of outsiders buying up land illegally and clearing everything at once is fragmenting large properties. The grassroots community units known as núcleos de base, which once controlled who entered the reserve and approved new inhabitants, are gradually eroding, particularly along the southern fringes where access is easy. Attendance at community meetings has collapsed—from packed halls to at most eight people. A spreading cattle culture, expressed in cowboy boots, beef consumption, weekend rodeos, and sertanejo music, is reshaping rural identity, and the younger generation sees less of a future in forest extractivism. Some inhabitants even receive threats when they report illicit activities to ICMBio.

Assessing the reserve’s potential for transformative change across four dimensions—multilevel governance, local context, cooperation, and social learning—the researchers find the property rights regime remains its strongest ingredient. The shift from individual land ownership to collective property rights, described by earlier scholars as innovative and idiosyncratic, safeguarded the rubber tappers’ territorial rights and identities. The alternative of conventional land reform would have subdivided the forest into allotments of merely 50 to 100 hectares, catastrophically disrupting the resource patterns on which seringueiros depend. But realizing the model’s full potential now requires genuine devolution of power to the local level. Local coordinators of the núcleos de base possess what anthropologist Fikret Berkes calls scale-specific comparative advantages: they know who enters the reserve and what leaves it—illegal cattle or timber movements that ICMBio cannot detect. Co-management between ICMBio and local communities, with democratically elected local authorities equipped with more resources, could strengthen compliance where the state alone cannot.

The study’s conclusion is ultimately a warning and a blueprint. Transformative change, the authors argue, is not a permanent achievement but an ongoing process requiring continuous adaptation and institutional innovation. Neither the state alone nor the inhabitants can protect the reserve on their own: ICMBio holds the mandate to expel illicit individuals, but the organized community knows about illicit occurrences at the local level. The coordinators of the núcleos de base serve as bridging institutions, linking horizontal cooperation among inhabitants with vertical partnerships that provide economic alternatives to cattle. Beyond the Brazilian Amazon, the findings offer broader lessons for protected areas worldwide seeking to reconcile conservation with sustainable development: a strong state institution cooperating closely with local actors based on trust and participation, combined with external partners that economically strengthen sustainable income opportunities, remains the most promising path. Whether the forest that carries Chico Mendes’s name can still deliver the transformation he died for depends on whether governance can learn as fast as the forces eroding it.

Subject of Research: Environmental Science

Article Title: Territorial governance for transformative change? Insights from the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve in the Brazilian Amazon

Article References: Territorial governance for transformative change? Insights from the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve in the Brazilian Amazon. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/fbuil.2026.1766645

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fbuil.2026.1766645

Keywords: Amazon, Brazil, deforestation, extractive reserves, territorial governance, protected areas, transformative change, Chico Mendes, cattle ranching, sustainable development, Territorial, governance

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 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