Preprints (www.preprints.org) | NOT PEER-REVIEWED | Posted: 29 October 2020
Leclère et al. (in Nature) have outlined the possibility of a biodiversity transition for the 21st century, a line of thinking equivalent to the Forest Transition theory and what it says about forest cover globally. The authors use a suite of global models to explore the impacts on global biodiversity of interventions on land-use, consumption and production patterns. They outline six strategies that have the potential to stop the downfall of global terrestrial biodiversity by 2050 and redress it to a pre-1970 level by 2100. Although robust, sophisticated and well-illustrated, the conclusions of this paper cannot alone be used to frame a post-2020 biodiversity strategy.
We do not yet know how to adequately represent or integrate human behaviour models in land-use change models. Representations of human decisionmaking in such models are often not grounded in theory but limited to correlations with macro-drivers. When they are, the theories used generally derive from economics (i.e. the rational and selfinterested Homo economicus and associated optimisation algorithms).
Human decision-making differs systemically from these models by virtue of the adaptive strategies, heuristics, and resultant biases that people display along with the context-dependent way that people value outcomes. To represent human decision-making, the models use probabilities and utility functions, disregarding critical features of human agency—the capacity to act independently and make our own free choices—that would affect model outputs.
Humans’ cognitive biases and bounded rationality, the roles of intuition, affect, and society in shaping preferences, are all disregarded or undervalued. While the models can be used to explore the consequences of a set of behavioural changes on future scenarios, they (1) fail at capturing how we make choices and (2) are silent on how to achieve change that is dependent on these choices.
...Greater recognition of human agency across scales is a vital step for future global scenario development...
file:///C:/Users/Scott/Documents/preprints202010.0609.v1.pdf
