Biodiversity and strategy

Front matter

Hervé Brédif | Laurent Simon

Subtle equilibriums

Hervé Brédif and Laurent Simon

Foreword

The second reason is that, simultaneously, the body of scientific research published between the 1970s and the 1990s, by highlighting the role of disturbances in the dynamics of ecological systems, calls into question the idea of a natural equilibrium underpinning protected area zoning policies. This is particularly true of Steward Pickett and Peter Whites book (1985), The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics. With the boom in landscape ecology (Naveh and Lieberman, 1984; Forman and Godron, 1986), a new perspective emerged through the acknowledged role of spatial heterogeneity in maintaining the diversity of ecosystems and populations. However, as Paul Arnould (2006) pointed out, ‘considering landscape biodiversity or that of the major biomes that structure the biosphere integrates a territorial and cultural dimension’, which is inconceivable without including the human societies behind such landscape management. Hence, nature confined to parks and reservations is replaced by biodiversity that includes historical and social parameters. It can thus be envisaged as a resource for which the question of appropriation, use, and access arises. This was illustrated in the early 1990s by the debate around the common of ‘the common heritage of humanity’, which, at the Rio Conference in 1992, pitted the countries of the Global North against those of the Global South on the central issue of ownership. This entity, which integrates humankind, soon expanded to become a widely shared political object with considerable media coverage, the third reason for its remarkable popularity. As Virginie Maris (2010) highlighted, this is a new transformation:

‘Moreover, the term biodiversity suggests not only diversity itself but also the crisis it is undergoing. Biodiversity is not a property of the world around us over which we have no influence; it is a challenge we face.’

The concept, hence, shifts away from its scientific foundations (Le Guyader, 2008) to include all the dimensions of the living realm. ‘Living fabric of the planet’ according to Robert Barbault, it also opens up to the diversity of cultural forms viewed by Arne Næss, philosopher and pioneer of deep ecology, as ‘a part of the wealth and diversity of life forms on Earth’. This is a long way from the scientific approach that initially prevailed and far from having erased the ambiguities for which nature has been criticised. As Catherine Aubertin, Valérie Boisvert and Franck- Dominique Vivien (1998) have pointed out, ‘we've shifted from the purely scientific questions raised by evolutionary theories to geopolitical and industrial challenges’. Nature as biodiversity has entered the market and the political realm. Its definition varies depending on the author and the challenges at stake. No fewer than eighty definitions were identified between 1985 and 1995 (DeLong, 1996).

In the final analysis, far from overcoming the imprecise character of the term ‘nature’, the term ‘biodiversity’ has merely shifted the ambiguity. Critics were quick to point to the polysemic nature of the concept and ensuing pitfalls: ‘bring and buy sale’ (Lévéque, 2008), ‘fuzzy concept (Le Guyader, 2008), ‘technocratic substitute for nature’ (Blandin, 2013), etc. There is no lack of expressions to highlight the imprecision of the notion. However, the same researchers who criticised the notion use it. For example, in 1995, Jacques Blondel—President of the scientific committee of the French Institute for Biodiversity from 2000 to 2005—regarded the term biodiversity as an ‘empty shell which everyone fills as they wish’, but he published a book in 1995 entitled Biodiversité, un nouveau récit à écrire. However, this is hardly surprising and only illustrates ‘the impressive power of multiplication [of the notion] and the positive and dynamic charges associated with the assembled ideas of life and diversity [which] turn it into an unassailable term’ (Arnould, 2006). The result is a considerable amount of confusion, including in some peer-reviewed publications in renowned scientific journals:

“This is why one can frequently come across scientific articles that mention the term “biodiversity” in the title or keywords, whereas the article itself will focus, for instance, on a biological process or an ecosystem service and not on the diversity of life forms within an ecosystem.’ (Gosselin and Gosselin, 2010)

We neither claim nor wish to decide between all the possible acceptations. Instead, we feel that integrating the plurality of meanings is a means to understand better the issues and debates that permeate the stakeholders of biodiversity protection. Behind each definition, there is a conception, a project, and sometimes there are interests. How could it be otherwise when key international texts and their national and regional versions convey these ambiguities, reflecting the compromises between the various stakeholders?

Strategy aims for the efficiency of difficult action

Public action has been making great use of strategy lately, from global warming to the erosion of biodiversity and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a global phenomenon. Academics, the media, experts of

Foreword all types and politicians endlessly comment on government strategies, while state agencies, high scientific councils and expert forums produce countless ‘strategic recommendations’. Overusing the term leads to trivialisation, to the point of losing sight of its meaning. As a result, nobody really takes the trouble to define the term and consider whether it is being used properly.

Yet, there is a substantial body of work on the subject. It is worth recalling some of the basic teachings of this literature.

Derived from military vocabulary, the concept of strategy refers explicitly to war. The term strategist comes from the Greek stratos, ‘army’, ‘crowd’, ‘troop’ and agein ‘to lead’ and refers to the person who leads an army. The term strategy, therefore, implies a confrontation between opposite sides. It refers to action and, as a first approach to a definition beyond the military realm, may be defined as ‘the art of achieving one’s goals’.

Not just any action, however. Introduced in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (sixth century BC), strategy was initially concerned with the survival of the State and, specifically, how to guarantee its longevity in a world of rivalry and conflict. Because war can be waged in many ways, the term is now widely applied to the economic field: to avoid being absorbed by the competition or being eventually outperformed in their area of business, corporations and companies have a vested interest in developing strategies of their own. In every case, strategy is concerned with issues of the utmost importance, which are vital to the survival of the entity in question.

Specifically, strategy concerns complex action. Anything that does not pose a real problem, routine issues, current affairs or traditional controlled problem management falls outside the scope of strategy. Strategy implies that reality puts up a certain amount of resistance: a relatively strong degree of uncertainty as to the possibility of achieving the desired goal; a rather stubborn and uncooperative context; the significant probability of headwinds, paradoxical and unexpected effects; a greater or lesser risk that a set of factors, dimensions and stakeholders might combine in such a way—whether intentionally or fortuitously—as to thwart the end in view significantly. Hence, strategy fundamentally differs from planning, as the sociologist Michel Crozier pointed out in the quote at the beginning of this book. Planning applies to situations where reality is accommodating: a flexible reality that accepts bending to the planners will to conform to his intentions and projects. In short, it is a more or less cooperative reality. The first lesson, hence, is the necessity of ascertaining to which extent the ‘strategy’ claimed by a given entity is really deserving of the term and is not, in fact, a mere ‘action plan’ masquerading as strategy. Admittedly, however, if public action makes so much use of the notion nowadays, it is because the situation is more or less clearly viewed as uncomfortable, and the outcome is far from certain.

The purpose of strategy is not to shamelessly fleece the opponent, let alone obliterate them, as one might wrongly believe. Rather, it is to secure a significant profit or, better still, a substantial and durable advantage. Moreover, it is not a matter of setting grandiose goals and leaving it to the stewards to define the means of achieving them; in a strategic approach deserving of the name, the means are not mere variables in the service of the ends. The means should be considered together with the ends: the utmost economy of means for maximum relevance and efficiency. Hence, the critical issue: rather than overdoing things, it is preferable to identify the levers of change that will trigger the transformation processes, which in turn will bring the expected victory or desired improvement. Second key lesson: avoid grandiloquent commitments, which all too often hide a lack of resources or, worse, a certain lack of reflection when it comes to identifying the ways and means sufficient and necessary to reach stated goals.

Finally, Western and Eastern strategy treatises agree on one essential step: taking the time to meticulously examine the terrain, the notion of terrain being understood broadly to cover all the parameters and conditions likely to affect the configuration of the issue encountered. Close scrutiny of the terrain is critical to avoiding strategic errors resulting from overlooking dimensions or aspects that are, sooner or later, bound to thwart the aims pursued. More importantly, it is the only possible way to define realistic ends and the judicious and proportionate ways to reach them. Hence, the third lesson: the strategic diagnosis phase is essential to ensure that no significant aspect or component of the issue has been overlooked. In other words, science and strategy should be clearly distinguished. Science is concerned with knowledge: its purpose is to increase our understanding of phenomena. Conversely, strategies are concerned with action: they aim to increase the effectiveness of action pertaining to significant problems or issues.

Strangely enough, contemporary rhetoric tends to obscure this distinction. Faced with a number major economic crises, we are told that the solution simply consists in reconciling scientific truth with political will. This amounts to an odd confusion between the register of knowledge

Foreword and the register of action—as if scientific knowledge could automatically lead to relevant and practical action. While this may be acceptable for areas and fields where scientific expertise can directly inspire political decision-making, this fallacious understanding of action has no chance of success in facing complex issues that involve intricate and multiple parameters, stakes and stakeholders with diverging logics and interests. Facing such situations, it is worth remembering that strategy is precisely ‘the art of achieving one’s goals’ under challenging contexts.

E INTRODUCTION

Unlike climate change, biodiversity loss is not a major controversial issue. In fact, specialists agree on three key points: because of the roles it plays and the goods it produces, biodiversity is crucial to the future of humankind; natural environments have been significantly degraded by human activity for decades, and the many threats looming on the horizon mean that the diversity of life forms is in danger of collapsing brutally and uncontrollably; only awareness and a thorough review of the relationship between human activities and natural systems can avert the predicted catastrophe, for species, natural environments and humans alike.

Unfortunately, notwithstanding repeated appeals from the highest scientific and moral authorities, the revolution in awareness and behaviour is slow in coming. Political agendas are dominated by economic, social, security and geopolitical emergencies. Climate change continues to take precedence over all environmental issues. In a society of screens that is now predominantly urban, the connection with nature has significantly weakened. As a result, those who are most concerned about the future of life on Earth regularly give in to despair, and disillusioned assertions proliferate: ‘Nobody cares about biodiversity, indifference is the rule’; “Triumphant capitalism doesn’t care; more than ever, economic interests are running the show and lobbies rule the roost’; ‘Politicians are unable to free themselves from the dictatorship of the short term, electoral deadlines dictate the priorities of the moment’; “Materialism and individualism are the scourges of our age, and the common good pays the price every day’. This general picture—easy to paint as it is relayed through thousands of different channels—nevertheless omits one key aspect. The general public is unaware of it, and many people who work in the field to protect nature and living things are only vaguely aware of it: for several decades now, public policies on biodiversity, in France as in the rest of the world, have been inspired primarily by an official strategic approach. Gradually developed in the wake of international meetings on species protection and nature conservation and consolidated by several international conventions, including the Convention on Biological Diversity promoted by the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, it has steadily gained in strength, precision and scope. Building on this long history and continuity, in 2010, the international community developed a ‘strategic plan’ featuring twenty primary targets to stem the erosion of biodiversity. The fact is that, despite large-scale studies and international expert reports, numerous intergovernmental meetings and the resolve to achieve results through multilateral negotiations, and despite the significant progress made on a few indicators, expectations about the future of biodiversity have never been so bleak.

Strangely, strategic thinking at work in the case of biodiversity hardly raises any questions. Books and papers on the crisis of the living world, the science of biodiversity, and the philosophy or governance of nature abound, yet minimal research deals directly with biodiversity strategy or strategies. Our book aims to address this gap.

Traditionally defined as ‘the art of achieving one’s goals’, strategy implies identifying the conditions and means of efficient and relevant action; as necessary as they may be, scientific inventory or diagnosis are insufficient to build a strategic approach deserving of the name. More specifically, we base our work on a hypothesis that can be formulated simply: could the difficulties and failures encountered in the fight against biodiversity loss stem from an incomplete way of framing the problem, which would affect how we attempt to solve it? In other words, are the foundations of the strategic approach governing the conception of action to fight biodiversity loss being challenged? Not that we should reject out of hand the usual explanations offered to explain the lack of attention paid to biodiversity, in the view of many observers. Not that we mean to call into question the wealth of thoughts, experiences and knowledge patiently accumulated regarding the erosion of living things and how to respond to it. However, we will be considering whether certain aspects, dimensions or relationships have been insufficiently considered in how we have tried to curb the phenomenon. By bringing these neglected areas or blind spots back into the equation, we will see how they can be used to draw up a more comprehensive strategic diagnosis, a diagnosis likely to make pro-biodiversity action significantly more effective by allowing it to rest on stronger and more promising foundations.

Introduction

This book comprises three sections. The first section explains the foundations of the official strategic approach to fight biodiversity loss. We will see that the current diagnosis is based on three key ideas and that, over time, global action has been built around five major pillars or directions. However, these pillars or directions are not fully recognised, as they are driven by distinct communities of experts and players.

The overall structure of official strategic action raises few objections. However, the practical arrangements on which it is based give rise to a host of criticisms which are not entirely reflected in the diagnosis behind international negotiations. The second section of this book sets out to identify and formulate such criticisms and limitations by focusing on those expressed by researchers and recognised experts in their field. The resulting overview is not intended to be exhaustive. The ideas and arguments presented will probably be familiar to specialists. Still, they are all the more interesting as they are part of an overall picture which, as far as we know, has never been produced before.

Through comparison of previous analyses and results, the book’s third section shows that the official diagnosis of the state of biodiversity is surprisingly simplistic and skewed. A cross-disciplinary examination of the criticisms and limitations formulated by various specialists brings to light neglected and converging dimensions of the problem; reintegrating them enables us to develop a substantially updated strategic diagnosis that resonates with the nature of the issue at hand. The point, therefore, is not so much to propose turnkey strategies—the various players involved in biodiversity are ideally placed to develop these with all the necessary contextual finesse—as to insist on a few promising levers for transformation.

It would be impossible to analyse the results and limitations of actions undertaken over the decades to promote biodiversity without looking at the players and context behind these actions.

A long-standing community of thinking

A particular community of stakeholders was behind this concern. This community placed the issue on the international agenda, which has consequently shaped how the problem has been approached‘. There are a few significant texts that provide insight into the strategic thinking of these players. These include the 1948 founding text of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the 1980 World Conservation Strategy’ drawn up by IUCN‘ and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the 1992 Rio Convention on Biological Diversity, the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the 2010 Aichi Targets and the 2019 report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

4, The movement in defence of nature began at the end of the nineteenth century. However, we will only mention post-1945 texts which we feel are the most relevant to understanding current strategies. For a full analysis, see Bergandi and Blandin (2012).

5. In the 1990s, IUCN would publish several fundamental documents: ‘Conserving the world’s biological diversity (McNeely et al.) in 1990, ‘Sauver la planète’ (Saving the planet) in 1991, a text updating the 1980 strategy and in 1992, a document called ‘Global biodiversity strategy’.

6. The change of acronym (IUPN became IUCN in 1956) marked a significant shift in the organisation’s theses in favour of a conservationist approach less focused on strong protection (see Bergandi and Blandin, 2012).

Hence, there are but a few such central texts of strategic import”. Despite certain shifts, which we will discuss later, they demonstrate a veritable continuity of thought centred around a few major institutions. Such enduring continuity—spanning close to seventy years now—makes it possible to identify and analyse the building blocks of the strategies adopted and their invariants, i.e. how problems are posed and solutions put forward. The import of these texts is such that they were adapted at the European level (European Unions biodiversity strategy in 1991), national level (first national biodiversity 2004-2010 in France), and local level (such as the 2020-2030 biodiversity strategy in the Ile-de-France region). It is quite impressive to observe the extent to which local and national strategies were modelled on global strategies, reproducing their approach almost identically. The following analysis centres on this corpus of texts and the conditions in which they were produced.

The decisive role of top international organisations

The biodiversity community gravitates around non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and international bodies. It relies heavily on the participation, knowledge and contributions of scientists who predominantly hail from the life sciences.

The creation of the IUPN in 1948 was a major first step*. Patrick Blandin writes that it marked the birth of a ‘Nature International’. The founding text would be signed by governments (initially eighteen), as well as by seven major international organisations (starting with UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and many national bodies from all over the world. The clearly stated goal was the ‘preservation of the living world’, considered to be the responsibility of States, and even more so of the international community, with IUPN setting itself the goal of developing international agreements and the signature of a ‘world convention for the protection of nature’.

From the outset, IUCN relied on international bodies, in particular, UNESCO and then progressively on other UN-related bodies, such

7. Between 1950 and 2010, however, other conventions, reports, treaties and action programmes complemented these key texts without attaining equal ‘strategic’ value. 8. Our purpose is not to proceed to an exhaustive analysis of the history of the relationship between society and biodiversity. For further information on this subject, please refer to Patrick Blandin’s book, Biodiversité. Lavenir du vivant (2011).

as the Food Administration Organization (FAO), the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNEP. UNESCO and IUCN would jointly organise major conferences to set the pace for awareness-building. This was the case of the First World Congress on National Parks in 1962, in Seattle, or the Paris Conference in 1968 that would give birth to the programme Man and the Biosphere (MAB). While the Seattle Congress was still primarily dominated by conservation specialists, the 1968 Conference opened to a broader range of stakeholders (with the growing influence of international bodies and major NGOs) through the participation of the FAO and the WHO. The 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, essentially organised and facilitated by IUCN members, gave birth to a new international instrument, the UNEP. It was also the IUCN, together with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), UNESCO and FAO, that drew up the World Conservation Strategy in 1980”, defining the conservation goals and the measures to be adopted internationally and nationally. The role of States is fundamental within UN-related bodies. Indeed, their autonomy, budget, staff and delegated powers hinge on the resources member states allocate (Orsini, 2017).

Alongside the IUCN, associated with international conferences and congresses, as we have just mentioned, other environmental NGOs have also become critical actors in biodiversity protection policies (Chartier, 2015). They are active worldwide and play a key role in shaping the policies implemented. This is the case of the WWE with its many campaigns to protect specific threatened species (tigers, whales, rhinoceroses and elephants) that have led to international (or national) texts, such as the 1982 moratorium on commercial whaling. The same is true of the numerous Greenpeace campaigns against deforestation in the Amazon (Chartier, 2005). Not only did they raise international public awareness (mostly in northern countries), but they also helped place the issue of the certification of commercial timber on the international agenda, in particular by promoting the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification (Arnould, 1999), ideated by Greenpeace and WWF experts, among others. These international NGOs also started managing protected sites; as a result, they are often at the root of recommendations on managing protected areas. Consequently, the WWF became a ‘key player in the conservation policies of many developing countries’. Moreover, international NGOs

9. This was the first text officially mentioning the need to preserve ‘genetic diversity’.

play an advisory role during big conferences and some—the WWE especially—have partnered with global corporations. Given their scale and the network of experts they federate, they play a considerable assessment and expertise role, which they can leverage in the international legal arena. These international players remain deeply rooted in the rationale that prevailed when the IUPN was founded, namely the international development of agreements and conventions. As a result, such agreements proliferated, and no less than seven hundred and thirty regional or multilateral agreements on the environment had been signed by 2015 (Morin and Orsini, 2015).

The 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development—better known as the Rio Summit—marked the advent of the term biodiversity on the international scene, reflecting the decisive influence achieved by the community of international players. It introduced a ‘philosophy’ of action and governance mechanisms, consolidating the influence of a few ‘big’ players. Once again, the preparation of the summit was a joint effort of international bodies (UNEP, IUCN and WWF), supported by an American institute, the World Resources Institute (WRI!°). After bitter discussions, this summit, which remains the largest gathering of world leaders, adopted a Convention on Biological Diversity whose governing body is the Conference of Parties (COP), with representatives of every government that ratified the text. At this point, biodiversity explicitly became an international concern, debated and discussed internationally by global players. It instituted an international calendar of key thematic meetings every second year. The international agenda, therefore, sets the pace and guides biodiversity policies under the aegis of the major global players.

However, these global groups have opened up to non-governmental players in the last twenty years. Long confined to the role of mere observers, over the last decade, these players have become fully-fledged partners in the negotiation process. Yet they form such a disparate group that it is difficult to consider them as a separate entity!!.

10. The WRI is an American think tank founded in 1982.

11. ‘Agenda 21 of the United Nations identifies nine major groups of non-governmental players: women, children and youth, indigenous people and their communities, NGOs, local authorities, workers and their trade unions, business and industry, the scientific and technological community and farmers.’ (Morin and Orsini, 2015)

At the same time, the difficulties encountered locally in several countries in getting protection statutes adopted have raised the concern that local stakeholders should be involved in the measures put in place. Thus, most international texts in recent decades refer to participation as an indispensable tool for the acceptability and sustainability of biodiversity policies. As a result, a significant evolution occurred recently in the conception of protected areas, with some designed to ensure both protection and local development. Nonetheless, this emphasis on participation has hardly affected the respective influence of the various stakeholders. Participation is still widely designed to secure acceptance of the highest-level decisions.

Biologists and economists watching over biodiversity

The international players relied on scientific research at a global level’. From the 1960s onwards, committed scientists and experts would sound the alarm. Some books have had a significant impact worldwide and primarily contributed to global awareness. For example, biologist Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published in 1962, marked the beginning of the new environmentalism movement in the United States; in France, ornithologist Jean Dorst’s book Avant que nature meure, published in 1965; biologist Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb in 1968; biologist Edward O. Wilson’s 1992 publication The Diversity of Life and, more recently, in 2005, biologist Jared Diamond’s bestseller Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

Moreover, from the outset, the scientific world was closely involved in the bodies and discussions preparing critical international meetings. At first, it was broadly represented in large institutions, NGOs and intergovernmental organisations, with members either on their scientific council, expert panels or management boards. Up to the 1990s, all the IUCN presidents (the first female president was elected in 1996) were scientists. They, or at least some of them, were keen to open up the field of science

12. Scientists have long been influential in supporting the nature protection movement. Scientists were key speakers when the IUPN was founded and at the International Technical Conference in Lake Success (1949). In 1954, Professor Roger Heim, Director of the Museum of Natural History and member of the French Academy of Sciences, was elected President of the IUPN. Under his presidency, the IUPN became an organisation strongly ‘rooted in science’, an approach that would be confirmed by the presidents who followed: the Swiss biologist Jean Baer (1958-1963) and the French physician and ecologist Francois Bourliére (1963-1966).

to political decision-making, consequently falling within the scope of expertise, ‘understood in the broad sense as the integration of scientific knowledge into a political decision-making process’ (Granjou, 2003). These ‘scientist experts’, essentially from the biological sciences, were the first to contribute to the awareness of the damage caused by societies to species and ecosystems. The International Council of Scientific Unions and the International Union of Biological Sciences were among the seven international organisations that signed the IUPN constitution in 1948. Most scientists who hold high-level positions in international bodies come from these disciplines. In light of what they consider an absolute emergency, these biologists, under the leadership of Michael Soulé, created a new discipline, ‘conservation biology’, which aims to be a science of action focused both on the assessment of biodiversity losses and on the urgent measures to be taken to curb or halt the process. These scientists have founded internationally recognised journals, such as Conservation Biology, which offer a comprehensive set of analyses around the central concept of biodiversity. These analyses have led their authors to diagnose the situation (essentially regarding ecology and biology) and considerations on how to curb the crisis. Hence, many international research programmes have emerged to assess the state of biodiversity. The first significant initiative in this area was launched by UNEP and resulted in the Global Biodiversity Assessment of 1995, the creation of an international observatory, the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network which regularly draws up the Global Environment Outlook; the funding of extensive research programmes such as DIVERSITAS started in 1991 as the brainchild of a partnership between UNESCO and the International Council for Science (ICSU).

Two key phases should be highlighted regarding this research effort. The first one was marked by the kick-off in 2001, under the aegis of the United Nations, of an ambitious programme: the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA). The MEA’ goal is to identify the state of ecosystems and the social challenges linked to these ecosystems. The project’s Steering Committee comprises thirty-three members, including fifteen scientists, a dozen representatives of international bodies and national administrations, one WRI representative, one IUCN representative and one from the private sector through the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Denis Pesche (2013) has highlighted the significant role of some, primarily scientific, networks in the MEA’s evaluation process. In addition to the World Bank and the representatives of environmental international bodies and global conventions, two scientific networks would play a key role: One is concerned with ecological economics, bringing together ecologists, biologists and economists; the other, more directly focused on the study of ecological processes, works specifically with the UN bodies in charge of climate change. Such a composition can be partly explained by the MEA’s future approach: a ‘planetary’ approach to the issue that focuses on the significance of ecosystems and their valuation. In fact, the MEA would be behind the circulation of the concept of ‘ecosystem services’ aimed at defining the social value of ecosystems. As highlighted by Pauline Teillac-Deschamps and Joanne Clavel (2012), this approach has helped attract new players around the issue of biodiversity. It also introduced nature into the realm of economic assessment. In this way, the MEA bore witness to the growing involvement of economists within the scientific community. This met with a need expressed by the life sciences: to make the issue of biodiversity visible, concrete and assessable.