Sand is the most consumed commodity on Earth. Yet its extraction is inherently unsustainable because of key factors such as its non-renewable nature and the lack of readily available substitutes in the current industrial milieu. Indiscriminate sand extraction has severe consequences for ecosystems and the people who depend on them. Despite increased attention over the past few years from the academic community, much of the existing sand literature remains problem-oriented and focused on sand supply, limiting our ability to envision and implement sustainable alternatives. To address this gap, we conducted a scoping review, focusing on solutions to the sand crisis within the scientific literature. We identified 266 articles that shed light on alternative materials, and innovative practices within the built environment. Our findings reveal a diverse array of promising initiatives, classified as “sand seeds,” which have the potential to significantly reduce the environmental impact of sand extraction while supporting economic and social benefits. However, the literature also highlights challenges in scaling these solutions and integrating them into mainstream practices to achieve transformative change. Identifying and assessing these seeds offers a foundation for scholars and policy makers to propose and implement sustainable alternatives to current sand extraction practices. Future research should adopt participatory and transdisciplinary approaches to examine how these seeds are influenced by the funding landscape, synergies across sectors, or competing uses that could influence material choices in the built environment.

Rural landscapes are vital for many species. However, the shift toward intensive agricultural practices with high external inputs has significantly reduced heterogeneity, habitats, and hence, biodiversity in these landscapes. One promising response is the formation of landscape-oriented partnerships, voluntary collaborations among diverse actors aimed at promoting biodiversity restoration or conservation within a specific landscape. These partnerships are increasingly seen as potential drivers of broader transformative changes in agricultural practices and landscape management. Yet, research indicates that although many partnerships achieve positive outcomes, they rarely realize fundamental changes within or beyond the landscape itself. Understanding how such initiatives can amplify their impact is central to assessing their potential as “Seeds of Good Anthropocenes,” initiatives that prefigure and catalyze radically more sustainable futures. This paper advances the understanding of the amplification processes by which landscape-oriented partnerships contribute to transformative change for biodiversity in rural landscapes. We conducted a comparative case study of partnerships working on bulb farming and the restoration of landscape elements in the Dutch Dune and Bulb Region in the Netherlands, using interviews, participant observation, and policy document analysis. Based on our analysis, we identify three important insights for understanding amplification processes. First, we found that the combinations and interactions of different amplification processes influenced a partnership’s contribution to transformative change. Second, while promoting and embedding non-instrumental nature values, such as relational and intrinsic values, within partnerships is key to transformative impact, expanding a partnership’s activities or goals can hinder this process by aligning with existing values and policy goals rather than questioning them, thus limiting transformative potential. Third, alignment with policy goals emerged as a critical factor for enabling amplification; however, deliberate alignment with policy goals can also lead to narrowing down of partnerships, as most policies, rules, and regulations relevant for farmers are very specific and not system-oriented. Thus, to enhance partnerships’ impact on transformative change, governance approaches like integrative governance should guide the development of visions, policies, and laws at both landscape and higher levels.

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.

The Nature Futures Framework (NFF), developed under the Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), serves as a catalyst for advancing new scenarios and models focused on biodiversity and ecosystem services within the broader research community. In particular, the framework facilitates the development of scenarios and models that can help guide change processes toward desirable futures for nature and people. This paper assesses 31 studies that have engaged with the NFF since its introduction in 2020, aiming to identify which research areas have been addressed, and where development needs remain. The applications exhibit a large diversity in terms of locations, spatial scales, methods, outputs, and stakeholder involvement. The most common use of the framework has been in developing visions and scenarios. Nearly all studies engaged with diverse values of nature through the framework’s fundamental value perspectives: ‘Nature for Society’, ‘Nature for Nature’, and ‘Nature as Culture/One with Nature’. While the framework is generally perceived as useful, challenges remain in integrating the NFF across multiple scales and fully incorporating plural values, particularly in measuring relational aspects and avoiding Western-centric biases. Future research priorities include developing integrated, quantitative studies and exploring transformative pathways to enhance the framework's effectiveness in driving sustainable outcomes. Overall, the growing body of work using the NFF provides a strong foundation for distilling best practices, facilitating large-scale applications, and achieving the framework's objectives.

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.

Sand and gravel form the bulk of materials used in construction and manufacturing, but their continued extraction poses untenable social-ecological challenges. We argue for two overlooked approaches—sand circularity and sufficiency—to mitigate rising demand while safeguarding the ecological limits and social foundations of sand use in the Anthropocene.

Ponds and pondscapes are crucial habitats for biodiversity and provide significant ecosystem services and socio-cultural benefits. However, effective management of these habitats requires an in-depth evaluation of how stakeholders perceive them and interact with them. This study aims to explore stakeholder relationships with their local ponds and pondscapes to better understand their interactions, expectations, concerns, and perspectives, ultimately informing more effective conservation and management strategies. Using stakeholder storylines and the Nature Futures Framework (NFF), we analyzed data gathered from participatory workshops in eight countries (United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, and Uruguay). Thematic analysis was performed to identify key themes regarding stakeholders’ interactions, conservation expectations, climate change concerns, and management preferences related to local ponds and pondscapes across different countries. In addition, descriptive analysis was used to assess the different values that stakeholders assigned to ponds, including their ecological, cultural, and socio-economic significance. Our findings reveal a multifaceted relationship between stakeholders and pondscapes, deeply influenced by local socio-ecological contexts, including cultural heritage, biodiversity, recreation, and climate change concerns. Despite regional differences, stakeholders universally acknowledged the urgent need for sustainable conservation practices, envisioning future pondscapes that are resilient to climate change, rich in biodiversity, and capable of supporting diverse ecological and societal functions. Our study underscores the importance of integrating diverse stakeholder perspectives into pondscape management to foster more context-sensitive and sustainable conservation efforts that safeguard these vital habitats worldwide.

This paper examines the pathways to desirable nature futures as envisioned by 22 young people from all United Nations regions and diverse cultural backgrounds who participated in the second edition of the IPBES Youth workshop (2022). The workshop employed the Three Horizons framework and the Nature Futures Framework (NFF) to describe the plurality of youth visions for desirable nature futures and transformative pathways to achieve these visions. Based on the outcomes of the workshop, we conducted a qualitative content analysis categorizing the ideas and quantitatively assessed commonalities and differences among workshop groups, which were based on the NFF perspectives (nature for nature, nature for society, nature as culture, and a group in between perspectives). There were important differences in the visions and pathways articulated by the groups, but also commonalities, such as the importance of governance, community-based approaches, and education for achieving desirable nature futures. We also discuss the importance of flexibility in the NFF to accommodate diverse perspectives and involvement of youth in shaping global sustainability agendas. While many ideas raised by young people during this workshop align with existing conservation narratives, the study reveals the need to foster new and innovative ideas to drive transformative change that is sensitive to diverse contexts, histories, and experiences.

Biosphere Futures (https://biospherefutures.net/) is a new online database to collect and discover scenario studies from across the world, with a specific focus on scenarios that explicitly incorporate interdependencies between humans and their supporting ecosystems. It provides access to a globally diverse collection of case studies that includes most ecosystems and regions, enabling exploration of the multifaceted ways in which the future might unfold. Together, the case studies illuminate the diversity and plurality of people’s expectations and aspirations for the future. The objective of Biosphere Futures is to promote the use of scenarios for sustainable development of the biosphere and to foster a community of practice around social-ecological scenarios. We do so by facilitating the assessment, synthesis, and comparative analysis of scenario case studies, pointing to relevant resources, and by helping practitioners and researchers to disseminate and showcase their own work. This article begins by outlining the rationale behind the creation of the database, followed by an introduction to its functionality and the criteria employed for selecting case studies. Subsequently, we present a synthesis of the first 100 case studies included in the scenarios database, highlighting emerging patterns and identifying potential avenues for further research. Finally, given that broader utilization and contributions to the database will enhance the achievement of Biosphere Futures’ objectives, we invite the creators of social-ecological scenarios to contribute additional case studies. By expanding the database’s breadth and depth, we can collectively foster a more nuanced understanding of the possible trajectories of our biosphere and enable better decision making for sustainable development.

Integrated assessment models that incorporate biodiversity and ecosystem services could be an important tool for improving our understanding of interconnected social-economic-ecological systems, and for analyzing how policy alternatives can shift future trajectories towards more sustainable development. Despite recent scientific and technological advances, key gaps remain in the scientific community’s ability to deliver information to decision-makers at the pace and scale needed to address sustainability challenges. We identify five research frontiers for integrated social-economic-ecological modeling (primarily focused on terrestrial systems) to incorporate biodiversity and ecosystem services: 1) downscaling impacts of direct and indirect drivers on ecosystems; 2) incorporating feedbacks in ecosystems; 3) linking ecological impacts to human well-being, 4) disaggregating outcomes for distributional equity considerations, and 5) incorporating dynamic feedbacks of ecosystem services on the social-economic system. We discuss progress and challenges along each of these five frontiers and the science-policy linkages needed to move new research and information into action.