Abstract ID: 3.10040 | Accepted as Talk | Talk/Oral | TBA | TBA

Global change drives biodiversity loss and declining ecosystem service provision. While exploratory scenarios that extrapolate current trends are useful for highlighting the consequences of continued anthropogenic environmental degradation, they provide little guidance for averting the undesirable futures they predict. On the contrary, normative scenarios, emphasizing on positive outcomes for nature and society, rethink existing strategies and envisage possibilities for transformative change. In this contribution, we demonstrate how combining normative scenarios, with exploratory conservation policies, can be used to identify protected areas to secure biodiversity and ecosystem service provision under future uncertainty. We operationalize the IPBES Nature Future Framework into five framing scenarios and simulate each under 216 combinations of conservation area expansion strategies (e.g. extent, timing, and rate of establishment, as well as different management strategies) to explore the spatial-temporal impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services in the Swiss Alps through quantitative modeling until 2060. The approach was developed to support policy-makers in designing and managing a functioning ecological infrastructure for Switzerland. The results show that planning new conservation areas based on their current importance for biodiversity and ecosystem services is ineffective as climate change and land use changes will often substantially reduce the ecological value of these areas in the future. Instead, by incorporating future predictions of change drivers within conservation planning we can identify both robust areas and robust strategies that sustain high biodiversity and ecosystem services under a range of uncertain future conditions. In this regard, we highlight how Alpine areas in Switzerland will be of increasing importance for future conservation and interventions should focus on a pro-active approach to restoring natural and semi-natural ecosystems rather than a reactive approach to preventing undesirable land use changes.