Tröger, Ulrike

Biodiversity is a key global common, critical to maintaining wildlife and natural ecosystems, and a pillar to human survival. It is not only clear our dependence on it to fulfil our basic needs such as food, air, and water but also as the base of our society and culture. Regardless of the efforts during the last decades to slow down and stop the deterioration of biodiversity, these efforts have been proven insufficient to "bend the curve of biodiversity loss" (IPBES 2019). Global assessments have concluded that a fundamental, i.e. transformative change, is required to safeguard global commons and ecosystems. Despite its importance, the growing body of literature, and the urgent calls from the international community, it is still blurry how we could enable, accelerate or achieve cross-sectoral transformations. This contribution explores the transformative potential of spatial planning to enhance biodiversity, particularly considering that spatial planning is the place in which policies/decision-making meet, dealing with inherent uncertainty, complexity and inevitable normativity. To explore how spatial planning can contribute to transformation that enhances biodiversity, we used the transformative change framework developed by Wittmer et al. (2021) that combines different elements that make transformative change possible in a structured and integrated way. We further adapted this framework for application to spatial planning and created guidance documents to assess the transformative potential of individual and combined instruments or measures in the context of three identified ambitions for spatial planning. Through collaborative work with practitioner partners from three Arenas for Transformation in Italy, Portugal and Germany, we explore in practice the challenges and ambitions identified and discuss lessons learned, thus seeking to contribute to unlocking the transformative potential of spatial planning to enhance biodiversity.