#ThursdayTalks | Patricia Balvanera: 'The values of nature'

We welcomed Patricia Balvanera, Senior Researcher from the Institute for Ecosystem Research in Ecosystems and Sustainability - Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM), in a new #ThursdayTalks session.

She spoke about "The values of nature"

The way nature is valued in political and economic decisions is an important driver of the biodiversity crisis but also a vital opportunity to address it. In this talk, Patricia presented the main results of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services' values assessment. In this assessment, the IPBES team the great diversity of nature's values and propose a typology for organising them.

In her talk, Patricia identified the availability of methods to make the diversity of values visible, and also opportunities for integrating value diversity into decision-making. Finally, we talked about the importance of fundamentally questioning the paradigms of well-being and development, arguing that strategies that leverage a set of leverage points centred on nature's values will achieve the systemic transformations needed to navigate towards more just and sustainable futures.