Climate change calls for adaptive strategies to manage landscapes across governance levels, as differing policy frameworks distinctly shape landscape patterns and long-term ecosystem resilience. This study presents a novel adaptive framework that integrates planning objectives, landscape patterns, and ecosystem resilience through iterative feedback loops. The framework aims to achieve the desired scenario, SUS-RES, which balances sustainable planning objectives across national, provincial, and local levels while maintaining ecosystem resilience in a changing climate. The framework was applied to the Huangshui River Basin on China’s Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, a region facing significant challenges from climate change and human activities. By integrating the CLUMondo and LPJ-GUESS models, we compared SUS-RES with scenarios focusing on national (NAT), provincial (PRO), and local (LOC) governance priorities. The analysis revealed considerable mismatches in management goals across governance levels within the same socio-ecological system, emphasizing the necessity of cross-scale coordination to align planning objectives with ecosystem resilience. This study offers a practical framework for adaptive governance under global climate change, providing valuable insights into the intricate dynamics of resilience, sustainability, and governance authority in socio-ecological systems during the Anthropocene.

Achieving global sustainability goals requires most people and societies to fundamentally alter their relationship with nature. New approaches are called for to guide change processes towards sustainable futures that embrace the plurality of people’s perspectives on nature. This paper presents a novel approach to exploring desirable futures for nature and people that was developed through an application in National Park Hollandse Duinen in the Netherlands. This new national park is developed bottom-up by a diverse group of actors reshaping their interactions with each other and with nature. Our approach, co-designed with key stakeholders of the national park, engages with a new pluralistic framework for nature values presented by the IPBES task force on scenarios and models to catalyze the development of nature-centered scenarios. We integrated this Nature Futures Framework with the Three Horizons Framework in a participatory workshop process designed to bring people’s diverse relationships with nature to the fore, and jointly envision desirable futures and the pathways to get there. An analytical framework is used to analyze and compare the visions and assess their potential contribution to the SDGs. We summarize the results of the application in National Park Hollandse Duinen and reflect on lessons learned. We see much potential for this values-based futures approach to support change processes in various social-ecological contexts toward more sustainable futures for nature and people.

Freshwater biodiversity is declining dramatically, and the current biodiversity crisis requires defining bold goals and mobilizing substantial resources to meet the challenges. While the reasons are varied, both research and conservation of freshwater biodiversity lag far behind efforts in the terrestrial and marine realms. We identify fifteen pressing global needs to support informed global freshwater biodiversity stewardship. The proposed agenda aims to advance freshwater biodiversity research globally as a critical step in improving coordinated action towards its sustainable management and conservation.