VITAL-PATHS-FOOD: New Transformative Change Pathways for Tackling Climate, Human Development, and Biodiversity Loss and Incorporating Plural Perspectives on Justice and the Value of Nature.

Elliott Woodhouse , Christopher Wong, Larissa Nowak , Thomas Kastner, Daniel Braun, Thomas Schinko, Koen Kuipers, Jan Börner, Marta Kozicka, Sibylle Rouet-Pollakis, Rafaella Ziegert, Fulvio di Fulvio, David Leclère

The IPBES Transformative Change Assessment (2025) gives a central role to equity, justice, and the value of nature in facilitating sustainable transformations, by acting as a powerful deep leverage point that aligns sustainability transformations with the values and worldviews different communities hold. Scenarios and modelling studies offer a tool for examining ways of acting on these leverage points through visualizing futures where climate and biodiversity goals are achieved in an equitable way, and through stakeholder participation in quantification studies examining the enablers and barriers to progressing along these pathways. This paper presents the VITAL-PATHS-FOOD - three novel pathways created within a “Story and Simulation” approach exploring how transformative change towards a nature- and human-positive future might be pursued within the global food-and-biomass system in line with competing perspectives on justice and the value of nature. Our approach bridges the Nature Futures Framework to explore the plural value of nature, and a novel framework – AJUST – to systematically incorporate competing preferences for distributive, procedural, and recognitional justice across three transformative change pathways. We detail how 5 key global food-and-biomass value chains’ elements differ across the pathways to reflect different justice and value-of-nature preferences. We present narrative descriptions of these pathways and detail the methodology and rationale behind the project. We illustrate how variation in the way justice is conceived may lead to differences in the way that transformative change is pursued, due to differences in what policies are perceived as acceptable. We encourage engagement with the VITAL-PATHS-FOOD in new settings and different scales as a means of thinking through plural conceptions of justice with stakeholders.