New just pathways for biodiversity from the RAINFOREST project

The new deliverable from the RAINFOREST Project proposes the draft narratives of new, just pathways able to halt or reverse the ongoing global biodiversity decline through transformative change in the EU food and biomass nexus between climate action, production, trade, consumption, and human behaviour. The project team very much welcomes feedback on this first milestone!

One of the premises of the RAINFOREST project is that transformative change towards global sustainability goals could be accelerated by complementing existing long-term sustainable pathways for biodiversity with new pathways tailored to the context of EU biomass supply chains and explicitly focusing on equity dimensions. The authors linked two recent value-explicit pathway frameworks (the Sustainable Development Pathways and the Nature Futures Framework) with a new environmental justice framework developed at IIASA, to draft 3 contrasted narratives representing alternative pathways to reaching global sustainability goals, with a focus on biodiversity and EU supply chains. The deliverable also provides a broader review of existing pathways, the need for better considering equity dimensions, as well as required interventions and feasibility aspects. The project team welcomes feedback from the IAMC community on these draft pathways: this will contribute to refining the pathways before engaging in quantitative analysis, including the downscaling of global outcome and action targets according to alternative distributive justice principes, and the use of a toolbox combining the land use component of the MESSAGE-GLOBIOM integrated assessment model, the EXIOBASE MRIO model, biodiversity models and life cycle impact assessment methods.

Read the full deliverable here.