Managing biodiversity in the Anthropocene: discussing the Nature Futures Framework as a tool for adaptive decision-making for nature under climate change

Conservation approaches to social-ecological systems have largely been informed by a framing of preserving nature for its instrumental societal benefits, often ignoring the complex relationship of humans and nature and how climate change might impact these. The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) was developed by the Task Force on scenarios and models of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services as a heuristic approach that appreciates the diverse positive values of nature and its contribution to people. In this overview, we convene a group of experts to discuss the NFF as a tool to inform management in social-ecological systems facing climate change. We focus on three illustrative case studies from the global south across a range of climate change impacts at different ecological levels. We find that the NFF can facilitate the identification of trade-offs between alternative climate adaptation pathways based on different perspectives on the values of nature they emphasize. However, we also identify challenges in adopting the NFF, including how outputs can be translated into modeling frameworks. We conclude that using the NFF to unpack diverse management options under climate change is useful, but that there are still gaps where more work needs to be done to make it fully operational. A key conclusion is that a range of multiple perspectives of people’s values on nature could result in adaptive decision-making and policy that is resilient in responding to climate change impacts in social-ecological systems.