The biodiversity crisis must be tackled together with its core drivers, climate change and pollution. Current instruments for governing the climate–biodiversity–pollution nexus focus mainly on nature’s usefulness to humans, often failing to capture the full spectrum of values underlying these relationships – especially those of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. This greatly limits their effectiveness.
Combining a human-rights-based approach with pluriversal thinking
The LEVER project (“Enhancing pluriversality for a human-rights-based approach: Governing the climate–biodiversity–pollution nexus”) positions biodiversity loss within its broader interconnection with climate change and pollution, and focuses on integrating diverse worldviews and values, especially Indigenous and local ones. The aim is to enhance equitable and effective management of the climate–biodiversity–pollution nexus.
LEVER’s conceptual framework builds on the human rights-based approach (HRBA), which is grounded in the principles of universality, indivisibility, equality, non-discrimination, participation, and accountability. However, the project transcends standard HRBA applications by embedding these principles within a pluriversal perspective. This acknowledges the spiritual, emotional, and historical significance of non-human beings to diverse human identities, highlighting aspects that are often overlooked in dominant cultural and legal systems.
Transdisciplinary research in five case regions
The LEVER consortium works across five diverse case regions – the Santos Coast in Brazil, the Kanatang district in the Savu Sea Marine National Park in Indonesia, the Stockholm Archipelago in Sweden, the Aragon Region in Spain, and the Albertine Rift region in Uganda – to:
- Understand local values and perspectives on the climate–biodiversity–pollution nexus;
- Translate these values and perspectives into a glossary on pluriversal and human-rights-based legal principles;
- Explore transformative pathways for governing the climate–biodiversity–pollution nexus in each case region;
- Compare cases with respect to the effectiveness of pluriversal human-rights-based approaches for designing effective instruments to manage the nexus in commons areas, and identify cross-case enabling conditions for transformation;
- Provide actionable policy recommendations and operational guidance at national and international levels and facilitate their integration into frameworks and policies.
Scenarios to explore the effectiveness of pluriversal human-rights-based approaches
The team at CDE has a major role in overall project management and leads the work package focusing on participatory scenario development. This involves putting together transdisciplinary teams of ecologists, social scientists, legal experts and policymakers that work with local communities to collaboratively develop three future scenarios (so-called horizons) regarding governance of the climate–biodiversity–pollution nexus:
- Horizon 1 – business as usual: continuation of current governance models, policies, and management instruments.
- Horizon 3 – transformative pluriversal governance: desirable future in which the management instruments have been designed and implemented according to a collaboratively developed, pluralistic human-rights-based approach.
- Horizon 2 – closing the gap between Horizons 1 and 3: transitional actions and innovations, including legal, institutional, and participatory reforms, required for operationalizing a human-rights-based approach sensitive to pluriversal values.
Scenario development methods are tailored to the local context in each of the case regions, comprising living labs (Brazil, Indonesia), dialogical interviews and storytelling (Uganda), and focus groups and structured interviews (Sweden, Spain). The scenario outputs form the basis for cross-region comparison, identification of transformation levers, and development of policy recommendations to be integrated into policy processes.
