Tage der Biodiversität 2027

The IPBES has identified a more recent addition in the values assessment: relational value. Relational value is most commonly understood as the relationship between humans and nature (IPBES, n.d). There is some current research that criticises relational values as misguided, unnecessary, and even harmful in the sense that new attention and focus on relational value with biodiversity takes away from the relational aspects of intrinsic and instrumental values (James, 2022; Luque-Lora, 2023; Baard, 2025). There is a call for global biodiversity governance that is transformative. Within the biodiversity governance context, the term “transformation” can be defined as “a fundamental society-wide reorganisation across technological, economic and social factors, structures, including paradigms, goals and values” (Visseren-Hamakers & Kok, 2022). Key issues that have led to the call for transformative global biodiversity governance include issues with measurement bias, defining biodiversity, and scale (Visseren-Hamakers & Kok, 2022). Additionally, the exclusion of local people within biodiversity governance decision-making has also made the call for pluralism within biodiversity governance an aspect of transformation (Gupta et al., 2023). Key mitigation efforts to prevent global biodiversity loss include biodiversity conservation, biodiversity restoration, and biodiversity offsetting. It is important to understand that these mitigation efforts are not neutral in addressing global biodiversity loss and do impact people on the ground. Biodiversity offsetting for example, can disrupt and even harm relational value (Whyte, 2018; Armstrong, 2025). How do we address criticism of relational value within the concept of transformation for biodiversity governance? I argue that relational value can be better understood by identifying underlying issues within biodiversity mitigation practices and how these underlying issues of conception, measurement, and scale show the non-neutrality of mitigation practices and relational value.