Coral reefs are vital social-ecological systems, but highly vulnerable to global change and local stressors. While conveying the urgency of existential threats is paramount, bleak outlooks can become self-reinforcing, limiting capacities to act. To counter this, experts working on coral reefs in diverse geographies imagined coral reef futures through a structured visioning process. The resulting visions offer alternatives aspiring to desirability, sustainability, and equity for coral reefs. These broaden the conversation on coral reef futures, enabling discussions beyond siloed conservation, traditional management tools, or pure techno-fixes. Concepts such as earth stewardship, biocultural revitalization, and anticipatory governance emerged as essential to sustaining human well-being and enabling the viability of future coral reef ecosystems before, during, and beyond social-ecological shocks. By fostering forward-thinking dialog, these visions and narratives constitute key stepping stones to reimagining desirable relationships between people and coral reefs and speak to both anticipatory and adaptive pathways toward desired change.

How people relate to and see themselves as part of nature relations differs worldwide and often depends on culture and worldviews. Nonetheless, challenging the dominant Euro-Western epistemic domination is needed to attain more equitable and sustainable future visions. This change entails fostering decolonial mediation between different knowledge systems in a context of intersectional difference. The collective struggles of Black, Indigenous, and other Women of Color (BIWOC) for self-determination shed light on pathways of decolonial mediations and how to attain epistemic equity when thinking about the future. Echoing the call of BIWOC to use decoloniality in knowledge co-creation, we co-created a border space together with 20 BIWOC in the Putumayo department of Colombia. In this space, we jointly envisioned three radical visions of the Amazon through scenario-building exercises between 2022 and 2023. Storytelling is a powerful tool to capture the BIWOC’s differentiated experience of the world and to explore their individual and collective emancipation from different forms of oppression. Decolonial mediations support the (co-)design of a “safe enough” space for questioning and rethinking Euro-Western domination. Our research also indicates that incorporating decolonial praxis into sustainability transformation research can allow for a more radical envisioning of the future.

In this paper we explore the potential of academic podcasting to e ect positive change within academia and between academia and society. Building on the concept of epistemic living spaces, we consider how podcasting can change how we evaluate what is legitimate knowledge and methods for knowledge production, who has access to what privileges and power, the nature of our connections within academia and with other partners, and how we experience the constraints and opportunities of space and time. We conclude by o ering a guide for others who are looking to develop their own academic podcasting projects and discuss the potential for podcasting to be formalized as amainstream academic output. To listen to an abridged and annotated version of this paper, visit: https://soundcloud.com/conservechange/podcastinginacademia.

The high seas are experiencing a stark increase in industrial activities, with resources being exploited unsustainably and shared unequally. This suggests the need for a transformation, a shift in the deeper structures of the system such as underlying paradigms and mind-sets. We created future visions by combining computational text analysis with a structured, yet creative futuring approach. This process resulted in four science fiction stories, which aim to capture the complexity of the system, embrace the inherent uncertainty of the future and question current unsustainable trajectories, while emphasizing the vastness of future option space. The visions are analyzed using the concept of imaginaries, demonstrating that futuristic stories can be traced back to current realities and the scientific evidence they were based upon. We argue that engaging with alternative futures can open up transformative spaces to rethink the relationships between humans and the high seas, from which novel imaginaries can emerge.

We find ourselves at a critical crossroads for the future governance of the high seas, but the perceived remoteness of the global ocean creates a psychological barrier for people to engage with it. Given challenges of over-exploitation, inequitable access and other sustainability and equity concerns, current ocean governance mech-anisms are not fit-for-purpose. This decade offers opportunities for direct impact on ocean governance, however, triggering a global transformation on how we use and protect the half of our planet requires a concerted effort that is guided by shared values and principles across regions and sectors. The aim of the series of workshops outlined in this paper, was to undertake a futures thinking process that could use the Nature Futures Framework as a mechanism to bring more transformative energy into how humans conceptualise the high seas and therefore how we aim to govern the ocean. We found that engaging with the future through science fiction narratives allowed a more radical appreciation of what could be and infusing science with artistic elements can inspire audiences beyond academia. Thus, creative endeavours of co-production that promote and encourage imagi-nation to address current challenges should be considered as important tools in the science-policy interface, also as a way to elicit empathetic responses. This workshop series was a first, and hopefully promising, step towards generating a more creative praxis in how we imagine and then act for a better future for the high seas.

The biosphere crisis requires changes to existing business practices. We ask how corporations can become sustainability leaders, when constrained by multiple barriers to collaboration for biosphere stewardship. We describe how scientists motivated, inspired and engaged with ten of the world’s largest seafood companies, in a collaborative process aimed to enable science-based and systemic transformations (2015–2021). CEOs faced multiple industry crises in 2015 that incentivized novel approaches. New scientific insights, an invitation to collaborate, and a bold vision of transformative change towards ocean stewardship, created new opportunities and direction. Co-creation of solutions resulted in new knowledge and trust, a joint agenda for action, new capacities, international recognition, formalization of an organization, increased policy influence, time-bound goals, and convergence of corporate change. Independently funded scientists helped remove barriers to cooperation, provided means for reflection, and guided corporate strategies and actions toward ocean stewardship. By 2021, multiple individuals exercised leadership and the initiative had transitioned from preliminary and uncomfortable conversations, to a dynamic, operational organization, with capacity to perform global leadership in the seafood industry. Mobilizing transformational agency through learning, collaboration, and innovation represents a cultural evolution with potential to redirect and accelerate corporate action, to the benefit of business, people and the planet. 

Recent studies suggest that the pervasive impacts on global fishery resources caused by stressors such as overfishing and climate change could dramatically increase the likelihood of fishery conflict. However, existing projections do not consider wider economic, social, or political trends when assessing the likelihood of, and influences on, future conflict trajectories. In this paper, we build four future fishery conflict scenarios by considering multiple fishery conflict drivers derived from an expert workshop, a longitudinal database of international fishery conflict, secondary data on conflict driver trends, and regional expert reviews. The scenarios take place between the years 2030 and 2060 in the North-East Atlantic (scramble for the Atlantic''), the East China Sea (the remodeled empire''), the coast of West Africa (oceanic decolonization''), and the Arctic (polar renaissance''). The scenarios explore the implications of ongoing trends in conflict-prone regions of the world and function as accessible, science-based communication tools that can help foster anticipatory governance capacity in the pursuit of future ocean security.

In the rapidly changing and uncertain world of the Anthropocene, positive visions of the future could play a crucial role in catalysing deep social-ecological transformations to help guide humanity towards more sustainable and equitable futures. This paper presents the outcomes from a novel visioning process designed to elicit creative and inspirational future scenarios for southern Africa. The approach based scenario development on seeds of good Anthropocenes, i.e. existing initiatives or technologies that represent current, local-scale innovations for sustainability. A selection of seeds was used to create four distinct, positive visions in a participatory workshop process. Common themes that independently emerged in all four visions were i) decentralized governance and decision-making; ii) a strong emphasis on equity and empathy; iii) high levels of connectedness between people; and iv) a reinforced, respectful relationship with nature. The visions mainly differ in the extent of fusion between people and technology in everyday life, and how much nature plays a role in defining the human experience. The narratives presented here describe worlds that have undergone a more significant paradigm shift towards shared human values and stewardship of resources than is explored in most other ambient narratives for the region. These Good Anthropocene scenarios therefore demonstrate more radical, previously unimagined ways of thinking about sustainability futures on the African continent and beyond.

Scenario development has been recognized as a potential method to explore future change and stimulate a reflective process that can contribute to more informed decision-making. The assessment process under IPBES (the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) has however shown that the current predominantly biophysical and economic models and scenario processes for exploring the future of biodiversity, ecosystem services and their contributions to human wellbeing are insufficient to capture the complexity and context-specific nature of the problems facing these sectors. Several important challenges have been identified that require a more in-depth analysis of where more imaginative scenario efforts can be undertaken to address this gap. In this paper, we identify six key characteristics necessary for scenario processes: adaptability across diverse contexts, inclusion of diverse knowledge and value systems, legitimate stakeholder engagement that foregrounds the role of power and politics, an ability to grapple with uncertainty, individual and collective thinking mechanisms and relevance to policy making. We compared four cases of imaginative, arts-based scenario processes that each offer aspects of meeting these criteria. These approaches emphasise the importance of engaging the imagination of those involved in a process and harnessing it as a tool for identifying and conceptualising more transformative future trajectories. Drawing on the existing literature, we argue that there is value in fostering more inclusive and creative participatory processes that acknowledge the importance of understanding multiple value systems and relationships in order to reimagine a more inclusive and just future. Based on this, we reflect on future research to understand the transformative role that imagination can play in altering and enhancing knowledge-making for global assessments, including IPBES. We conclude that creative scenario co-development processes that promote imagination and create an opening for more empathetic responses should be considered as complementary tools within the suite of methodologies used for future IPBES scenario development.

Non-state actors (NSAs) have proliferated in number and are increasingly acknowledged to matter for global governance of natural resources. This has generated considerable scholarly interest, but there is surprisingly little systematic knowledge about patterns and trends of NSA participation in global fisheries institutions. This article addresses this gap by studying NSA populations, considering more than 500 actors attending commission meetings, in the five tuna Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (tuna RFMOs) between 2004 and 2011. It constructs a theoretical framework drawing on previous insights from population ecology and global governance literature. The articles finds that multiple NSAs participate in tuna RFMOs, but there is no general trend towards increasing proportions of NSAs compared to state participants. Representational diversity was found to be relatively limited, as NSA participants were predominately representing industry interests and from high income countries. Volatility of NSAs varied across RFMOs, but it was clear that industry representatives were frequently repeat participants, while civil society organizations (CSOs) participated only in occasional meetings. Finally, industry representatives were found to participate as part of member state delegations, while CSOs generally participated as observers. The article discusses the implications of the variation in NSA populations across RFMOs, and over time, and in relation to important concerns in the broader scholarly debates on access, influence, representation, and effectiveness in global environmental governance.