1. This study examines sustainable development from the cosmovisions of Indigenous Peoples and other Traditional Communities (IoTCs) in western Bahia, a region in the Brazilian savanna of the Cerrado. It adopts a feminist decolonial and post-development approach to address issues of epistemic violence.
2. Employing participatory arts-based research, this study incorporates poetic and thematic co-analysis using participant-voiced poetry. This approach centres on community voices and contextual narratives of co-production, as well as the presentation of findings.
3. Our analysis shows that their understanding of sustainability is deeply rooted in cultural identity, spirituality and traditional practices such as family farming and artisanal fishing. These practices highlight their relational and community-oriented ways of living, deeply entangled with nature.
4. While the communities recognised the strategic value of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) for communicating their practices to a global audience, they found the framework insufficient in capturing the relational and context-specific dimensions central to their understanding of sustainability. This suggests the need for a reinterpretation of the SDGs.
5. This study introduces a new use of decolonial analyses to highlight the limitations of applying global, linear development models to diverse local contexts, using the case of the SDGs. It advocates for policies that recognise the pluriversal nature of sustainability, actively include marginalised perspectives and critically challenge epistemic hegemony.
6. By advocating for a re-inhabitation of the SDGs, this research highlights the importance of integrating relational and context-specific understandings of sustainability, ensuring that global frameworks respect and embrace diverse cosmovisions and practices.

This paper examines transformations in social-ecological system through the process-relational perspective (PRP), using the concepts of the “real-possible,” the existing reality, and the “actual-virtual” potentials that exist beyond current hegemonic thinking and practices—framed within the Latin American feminist concept of Nepantla, which refers to a liminal space of transition, ambiguity, and transformation where multiple perspectives, identities, or worldviews intersect. Focusing on Western Bahia in the Cerrado, Brazil’s critical agricultural frontier facing intense sustainability challenges, this study underscores the importance of recognizing and integrating coexistent realities to enhance sustainability efforts. Over six months of fieldwork in the region, interacting and living with local actors, Indigenous Peoples and Traditional Communities, our research utilized the PRP approach, offering deep insights into the perspectives and experiences of diverse actors in Western Bahia. This strategy highlighted that the production of phenomena is the result of a simultaneous entanglement between the researcher, the researched, the context, the script, the data, and the process of conducting participatory action research. Furthermore, this study highlights the often-overlooked spiritual dimension vital for Indigenous Peoples and Traditional Communities, as it deeply shapes their ways of life and perspectives on sustainability. By engaging with relational ontologies, we contribute to the conceptualization of transformations as ongoing, performative, and continuously unfolding processes. Moreover, we highlight the novelty of our research by advancing relational methodologies that honor liminality as a generative space —where multiple worldviews coexist, collide, and compost into new possibilities. We argue that embracing ontological plurality is essential for nurturing radical transformations in contested places like Western Bahia.

With intensifying climate change impacts on dryland regions, it is essential to better understand how actors relate to each other to sustainably manage natural resources. The literature on environmental governance networks has studied actor collaborations, but it is only starting to investigate networks that sustain conflictive situations. Moreover, while actors traditionally defined as powerful have received important scholarly attention, those who do not hold formal authority or key financial resources have not, as well as their sources of power. In this paper we analyse Net-Map data to better understand the sources of power of actor groups that traditionally are not perceived as influential, hence they are neglected in actor networks. We use social network analysis and a typology of power to understand these actors’ links in the networks, aiming to decipher what might explain why the traditionally neglected actors are perceived as particularly influential. We apply these methods to local sites in three case countries, all located in dryland regions. Net-Map workshops with diverse groups of participants were held with a focus on agricultural production systems. The results reveal that a broad variety of actors that traditionally have been, and still are, neglected in decision making domains, are perceived as particularly influential in their regions, pointing to the various modes in which power is understood and exercised. The competing interests over natural resources shed light on the role that conflictive tensions played in power relations. Through this work a broader understanding of power asymmetries in actor networks is gained.

The Three Horizons for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is a novel participatory approach to co-create future sustainable scenarios for supporting the implementation of the United Nations 2030 Agenda. Whereas the approach has been applied to inform the design of global-scale sustainability scenarios based on regional perspectives, it has not been implemented to explore how local and regional scenarios can be connected across sites and scales to inform governance processes in the implementation of the SDGs. This study applies an adapted version of the Three Horizons for the SDGs approach in four sites at regional and local scales in Spanish drylands to explore its potential to support policy coherence at multiple governance scales for advancing SDG implementation through dialogue between actors from multiple sectors. We conducted four two-day in-person workshops with diverse actors (n = 59) to explore their perceptions about the desired futures, current concerns, and strategies to achieve sustainable futures in the region. Results reveal 27 similar and nine dissimilar themes related to desired futures and current concerns, respectively. These findings provide common ground and highlight different contextual realities between sites that may serve as a basis for harmonizing policy priorities for advancing regional and local SDG implementation. The study also identifies 19 themes encompassing multiple strategies with the potential to establish associations across sites and scales to coordinate actions in alignment with the 2030 Agenda. We argue that the adapted version of the Three Horizons for the SDGs approach can serve as a tool to support coherent multi-scale governance needed to achieve global sustainability goals. We discuss lessons learned and limitations encountered from using the approach that provides guidance for future experiences.

The UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the Paris climate target require a holistic transformation towards human well-being within planetary boundaries. However, there are growing debates on how to best pursue these targets. Proposed transformation strategies include market- and technology-driven green-growth, shifting towards a sufficiency-oriented post-growth economy, and a transformation driven primarily by strong government action. Here we quantify three alternative sustainable development pathways (SDPs), Economy-driven Innovation, Resilient Communities, and Managing the Global Commons, that reflect these different societal strategies. We compare the quantifications from two integrated assessment models and two sectoral models of the buildings and materials sectors across a broad set of indicators for sustainable development and climate action. Our global multi-scenario and multi-model analysis shows that all three SDPs enable substantial progress towards the human development goals of the SDGs. They simultaneously limit global warming and prevent further environmental degradation, with the sufficiency-oriented Resilient Communities scenario showing the lowest peak warming and lowest reliance on carbon dioxide removal as well as the largest improvements in biodiversity intactness. The SDPs also alleviate the concerns about the biogeophysical and technological feasibility of narrowly-focused climate change mitigation scenarios. However, the shifts in energy and food consumption patterns assumed in the SDPs, ranging from moderate in Economy-driven Innovation to very ambitious in Resilient Communities, also lead to increased challenges regarding socio-cultural feasibility.

O documento apresenta uma síntese dos resultados obtidos pelos projetos NEXUS e XPaths, os quais se dedicam a explorar futuros sustentáveis em consonância com os 17 Objetivos do Desenvolvimento Sustentável (ODS) estabelecidos pela ONU para 2030. Este destaca a importância da colaboração entre multi-atores e em multi-escalas como um elemento-chave para promover avanços em direção aos ODS, evidenciando o potencial dos diálogos participativos na elaboração de estratégias para enfrentar desafios socioambientais.

Dentro do contexto da Bacia Hidrográfica do Rio São Francisco, esses atores identificaram quatro problemas principais e delinearam ações estratégicas correspondentes com o objetivo de alcançar sustentabilidade e justiça. Esses esforços demonstram um compromisso com abordagens integradas e participativas para lidar com questões complexas e interconectadas relacionadas ao desenvolvimento sustentável.

Os projetos XPaths e NEXUS colaboraram de maneira significativa, destacando a importância da cooperação interdisciplinar para promover a sustentabilidade. Em suma, o documento enfatiza a colaboração multissetorial e entre múltiplos atores como fundamental para avançar nos ODS, ilustrando o potencial dos diálogos participativos na elaboração de estratégias para enfrentar os desafios socioambientais emergentes.

This paper reports research that is part of a project to combat deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest by developing an online system designed to forecast deforestation risk over the short term, spanning 2 to 4 weeks. This online platform aims to empower stakeholders with timely data, facilitating proactive conservation and intervention strategies to safeguard the Amazon rainforest. We built a multitemporal database that compiles weekly deforestation alerts from the DETER project, forming our analysis’s backbone. Utilizing the XGBOOST regression algorithm, we have crafted a predictive model that identifies areas within the Amazon at imminent risk of more intensive deforestation. Preliminary results reveal an RMSE of 0.29 for predicting areas under deforestation risk, as validated against early alert data from 2020 to 2023. Our work advances environmental monitoring by focusing on a spatial resolution of 25 km × 25 km, providing accessible, near real-time information on deforestation risks.

Tropical deforestation impacts the climate through complex land-atmosphere interactions causing local and regional warming. However, whilst the impacts of deforestation on local temperature are well understood, the regional (nonlocal) response is poorly quantified. Here, we used remote-sensed observations of forest loss and dry season land-surface temperature during the period 2001 to 2020 to demonstrate that deforestation of the Amazon caused strong warming at distances up to 100 km away from the forest loss. We apply a machine learning approach to show nonlocal warming due to forest loss at 2-100 km length scales increases the warming due to deforestation by more than a factor 4, from 0.16 K to 0.71 K for each 10-percentage points of forest loss. We estimate that rapid future deforestation under a strong inequality scenario could cause dry season warming of 0.96 K across Mato Grosso state in southern Brazil over the period 2020 to 2050. Reducing deforestation could reduce future warming caused by forest loss to 0.4 K. Our results demonstrate the contribution of tropical deforestation to regional climate warming and the potential for reduced deforestation to deliver regional climate adaptation and resilience with important implications for sustainable management of the Amazon.

To halt further destruction of the biosphere, most people and societies around the globe need to transform their relationships with nature. The internationally agreed vision under the Convention of Biological Diversity—Living in harmony with nature—is that “By 2050, biodiversity is valued, conserved, restored and wisely used, maintaining ecosystem services, sustaining a healthy planet and delivering benefits essential for all people”. In this context, there are a variety of debates between alternative perspectives on how to achieve this vision. Yet, scenarios and models that are able to explore these debates in the context of “living in harmony with nature” have not been widely developed. To address this gap, the Nature Futures Framework has been developed to catalyse the development of new scenarios and models that embrace a plurality of perspectives on desirable futures for nature and people. In this paper, members of the IPBES task force on scenarios and models provide an example of how the Nature Futures Framework can be implemented for the development of illustrative narratives representing a diversity of desirable nature futures: information that can be used to assess and develop scenarios and models whilst acknowledging the underpinning value perspectives on nature. Here, the term illustrative reflects the multiple ways in which desired nature futures can be captured by these narratives. In addition, to explore the interdependence between narratives, and therefore their potential to be translated into scenarios and models, the six narratives developed here were assessed around three areas of the transformative change debate, specifically, (1) land sparing vs. land sharing, (2) Half Earth vs. Whole Earth conservation, and (3) green growth vs. post-growth economic development. The paper concludes with an assessment of how the Nature Futures Framework could be used to assist in developing and articulating transformative pathways towards desirable nature futures.

Understanding the cost-effectiveness of restoration initiatives is critical for their successful implementation. In this context, this study presents a new approach to investigating the cost-effectiveness of different forest landscape restoration strategies for achieving multiple restoration goals. The approach is based on an optimization model that allocates forest restoration to maximize three environmental benefits (biodiversity conservation, carbon stock increase, and soil loss reduction) while minimizing the cost. We explore scenarios based on the Brazilian Forest Code and the National Policy for Payment for Ecosystem Services. Our optimization approach simultaneously achieves high levels of multiple environmental benefits - more than 90% of the maximum possible biodiversity, carbon, and soil in a cost-effective manner for all scenarios. Variation among the scenarios in the absolute performance concerning the three objectives was small (within 2.5%) compared to variation in costs (up to 19.4%). These results reinforce the importance of quantifying trade-offs among objectives to a better understanding of the cost-effectiveness of restoration initiatives before their implementation.