Biodiversity Protection – Forecasting Success and Reversing Challenges in a Complex Socio-economic-ecological World

The UN 2030 Goals have set the agenda for environmental, economic development and health goals for the rest of this decade. Our working group will ‘reverse engineer’ key logistic problems associated with attaining these goals. We will start with the assumption that none of the environmental goals are met and that this results in a complex set of detrimental and inter-related social, economic and health outcomes. These bleak scenarios will provide a templet for us to reverse engineer the logistic development of these problems over an immediate time horizon - the next seven years. We will identify key deflection points in the developmental paths that generate irreparable environmental/ economic/ political tensions. This will allow us to discuss where and how governments and environmental NGO’s need to intervene in such a way as to deflect these unwanted outcomes. Sequentially included into our model framework will be economic and environmental change, changes in governance and spread of ideas, and ecological foodwebs. Additionally, we will attempt to identify the magnitude of gaps left in our protection agenda when we fail to attain our goals under different political and social scenarios.