Global biodiversity scenarios have long struggled to capture the diversity of ways people value and relate to nature, favoring instrumental, growth-oriented framings over relational and intrinsic perspectives. The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) was developed to address this gap, offering a pluralistic, target-seeking approach to imagining nature-positive futures. This Special Feature brings together contributions that advance the operationalization of the NFF across methods, geographies, and thematic domains—from visioning, narrative development and participatory co-creation to quantitative modeling and governance design. Drawing on these papers, we identify three cross-cutting lessons: the NFF functions best as a boundary object for negotiating plural values rather than a fixed typology; its operationalization depends on combining narratives, indicators, models, deliberation, and institutional design rather than any single method; and its next frontier lies in implementation, linking NFF-based scenarios to the policy instruments and governance institutions such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. We highlight the NFF’s strengths in fostering value pluralism, expanding the scope of possible futures, and identifying trade-offs and synergies among competing priorities. However, we also acknowledge the following persistent challenges: translating qualitative, place-based values into quantitative models, preventing the standardization of relational values, and navigating the normative and political tensions involved in defining “desirable” futures. In closing, we outline a research agenda centered on developing pluralistic indicators, strengthening integrated social-ecological modeling, exploring alternative economic paradigms, and deepening inclusive co-production. As global biodiversity governance shifts toward implementation, we argue that the NFF is now well positioned to move from concept to practice.

To build a sustainable future, people need new stories about how societies can engage with nature. Visions of the future are a powerful way to tell new stories, especially when they model value systems that are under-represented in dominant discourses about how the future might unfold or be guided. This paper outlines a participatory visioning process conducted in Mombera Kingdom, a traditional community located in northern Malawi. Using the Nature Futures Framework (NFF), a tool created by the IPBES task force on scenarios and models to help develop scenarios and models of desirable, sustainable futures for people and nature, we co-produced several desirable, value-diverse visions of the community’s future. To enable communication both within the community and a wider audience beyond academia, hopes and tensions embedded in these visions were captured by artworks and short speculative fiction stories that were widely disseminated to the public. We also applied semi-quantitative system mapping to integrate community insights with academic literature, and rearranged elements of the participatory visions into distinct future scenarios. These scenarios were designed to offer a local case study perspective that could feed into visioning at larger scales and thereby contribute to the ‘bottom-up’ scenario process advocated by the IPBES Task Force. This study’s approach specified multiple potential values for (and meanings of) the community’s landscape, offering an example of how research can navigate, support, and amplify value-plurality in post-colonial contexts.

Addressing the intertwined climate, biodiversity, and equity crises requires transformative societal change. Yet the scenario frameworks and models used to explore future pathways often reproduce existing institutions, governance systems, and social structures, limiting their ability to imagine more sustainable and just futures. A key gap is the lack of approaches that can identify and evaluate transformative actions while accounting for systemic inequities in implementation. Here, we argue that integrating climate and biodiversity knowledge across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, together with stakeholders and diverse knowledge holders, can support the development of normative scenarios and models for just and sustainable Earth system futures. We outline a research agenda, highlight emerging examples of this shift, and identify the coalitions and institutional changes needed to advance it. More inclusive scenarios and modeling tools are essential for foregrounding equitable solution pathways and informing decisions about collective futures.

Global Environmental Assessments (GEAs) are intended to gather expert knowledge on a topic of global importance and present it in a useful format to those who could use the knowledge in decision-making. GEAs have disseminated new knowledge, influenced environmental policy, changed the evolution of science, and furthered many careers. The GEA community has always adapted to changing circumstances, often by increasing the complexity of the assessment process. The current level of complexity of most GEAs, alongside today’s increasingly polarized societies, changes in international trade, biophysical changes to the planet, greater interest in cross-sectoral problems and solutions, enhanced technological capacity, and increasingly contested nature of some aspects of environmental science may indicate that we’ve reached a point where further adaptation cannot be achieved merely by adding more complexity. It may be time for more fundamental changes to the GEA scope, process, and delivery. We use the MA as a touchstone in exploring how GEAs have evolved, considering both challenges and possible paths forward to retain legitimacy, credibility, and salience in a changing world. One strong possibility is for GEAs to reorient to serve as support structures for a broader diversity of levels and types of decision-making and a broader array of decision-making actors. In a rapidly changing world, a diverse ecosystem of assessment approaches is likely to be more robust, have more impact, and evolve more quickly. Continuing to experiment with different models for delivering multi-scale environmental information will help GEAs fit the needs of the 21st century.

Current global economic activity is driving unprecedented nature loss. There is increasing recognition of the need to shift how economic activity is funded and organized to reverse nature loss, and this has led to a new focus on “finance for nature.” In this study we collect finance “seeds of good Anthropocenes,” existing initiatives that aim to connect funding and nature, and then analyze and compare these novel approaches and alternative ways to “finance nature.” Using a select number of these “seeds,” we use transformation theory to analyze the theory of change underpinning each seed and the Nature Futures Framework to identify each seed’s conceptualization of nature values. The study reveals that there is a diversity of approaches to change and financing nature among seeds, although most seeds rely on market-based mechanisms and are generally leaning toward the nature for society as a core value perspective. More experimentation is possible and needed with regards to non-market-based mechanisms, different ownership and governance structures, and incorporating perspectives that see nature’s value for nature’s sake or intertwined with culture. Existing seeds provide a template for future initiatives, and further studies of these seeds would help identify how the risks and benefits of different types of financial initiatives vary across contexts.

Over the past decade, corporate investors have increasingly recognized that responsible environmental and social practices are essential to long-term financial success. Despite growing interest, corporate practices remain largely unchanged, and planetary trends are deeply concerning. This review applies a systems analysis lens to understand how financial sector structures and actors influence sustainability outcomes, often in counterproductive ways. Key barriers include the lack of science-based metrics, poor integration of environmental risks, and limited capacity to evaluate complex system dynamics. Current financial practices frequently miss or misinterpret systemic sustainability risks. We identify three critical areas where collaboration between sustainability science and finance is urgently needed: (1) translating scientific insights into financial decision contexts, (2) supporting science-based corporate sustainability reporting, and (3) strengthening environmental impact assessment. Systems thinking helps clarify where financial leverage can drive meaningful, cross-scale change—an essential step toward aligning capital flows with long-term ecological resilience and sustainability goals.

Effective coastal exposure assessments are crucial for adaptively managing threats from sea-level rise (SLR). Despite recent advances, global and regional assessments are constrained by omitting critical factors such as land-use change, failing to disaggregate potential impacts by land uses and oversimplifying land subsidence. Here we address these gaps by developing context-specific scenarios to 2100 based on a comprehensive analysis of Chinese coastal development policies. We integrate high-resolution simulations of population and land-system changes with inundation exposure assessments that incorporate SLR, land subsidence, tides and storm surges, offering a more nuanced understanding of coastal risks. Across our plausible set of downscaled scenarios of shared socioeconomic and representative concentration pathways, policy decisions have a bigger effect on what is exposed to coastal flooding until 2100 than does the magnitude of SLR. Hence, coastal policy decisions largely influence coastal risk and adaptation needs to 2100, demonstrating the necessity of appropriate policy design to manage coastal risks.

Aligning national food systems with global goals is required for sustainable transitions. We examine if realistic, context-specific dietary changes, mindful of Swedish food culture and in line with future scenarios, are sufficient to meet ambitious environmental goals. Here, we quantified diets based on the four Swedish Food Futures scenarios, which reflect prospects of technological development, behavioral change, import trends, and values. Scenario diet nutritional intakes and environmental impacts were quantified and related to health targets and nationally adapted climate, cropland, and biodiversity boundaries. Dietary changes in scenario diets reduced environmental impacts by 30% compared to current diets. No scenario stayed within the strictest climate boundary without removal of energy-related food chain emissions—resulting in 50–60% additional impact reduction. Food chain waste reduction by 50% resulted in an additional 8–10% reduction in impacts. Dietary changes can make substantial contributions to staying within global climate, cropland, and biodiversity boundaries and meet health targets, but improvements in production and waste reductions are also required.

Human societies face existential challenges on multiple fronts: climate change, biodiversity loss, altered biogeochemical flows, social unrest and injustices. Innovative solutions are needed to shift current trajectories towards a sustainable and just future. Futures thinking enables people to explore and articulate alternative futures and find pathways towards their desired futures. Indigenous people have the potential to make significant contributions to futures thinking because of their distinctive perspectives: the viewpoint of already living in a post-apocalyptic world in the context of colonisation, unique knowledges, worldviews, and perspectives on time, as well as significant contributions to safeguarding biological and cultural diversity. A body of literature is emerging where Indigenous peoples contribute to and lead futures thinking approaches; however, this literature is diffuse and highly diverse in its approaches and terminology. Thus, we take an innovation-seeking and systematic approach to (1) identify patterns and processes in futures thinking with, for, and by Indigenous people; (2) highlight innovative approaches; (3) bring together diverse and sector-specific terminology; and (4) foreground emerging strengths and weaknesses. We identified four framings of Indigenous futures thinking: Adaptation oriented, Participatory, Culturally grounded, and Indigenising. Factors contributing to innovation include strong involvement of Indigenous people in the research team, co-design, and authorship, using Indigenous methodologies, cultural protocols, and explicitly employing decolonisation and trauma-informed approaches. We spotlight the challenges of conducting an exhaustive literature review in an emerging field with inconsistent terminology (e.g., capturing regions where Indigeneity is contested). We also create a living glossary of terms to aid other researchers and communities in using and refining the suite of methods identified here, with the aim of stimulating further innovations in this field.

Climate change calls for adaptive strategies to manage land system across governance levels, as differing multi-level policies distinctly shape land system and long-term ecosystem resilience. This study proposes an iterative approach for optimizing land-use pathways that balance competing policy objectives across national, provincial, and local levels without compromising ecosystem integrity in a changing climate. This approach was applied to the Huangshui River Basin on China's Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, a region facing significant challenges from climate change and human activities. We integrated the land-use change model CLUMondo with the dynamic vegetation model LPJ-GUESS to compare our sustainable development pathway against scenarios based on plans prioritizing national, provincial, and local governance objectives. The analysis revealed considerable mismatches in management goals across governance levels within the Huangshui River Basin, emphasizing the necessity of multi-scale coordination to align planning objectives for achieving desired goals. This study presents an optimization framework to quantitatively evaluate trade-offs and balance between sustainability objectives and ecosystem integrity in response to system feedbacks, offering critical insights into reconciling potentially conflicting sustainability goals across multiple scales within socio-ecological systems.