Desirable futures: Futures that incorporate transformative changes in order to improve the chances for societies to surmount biodiversity, climate or other crises, which are influenced by disparate human values and aspirations.

Drivers (direct and indirect): In the context of IPBES, drivers of change are all the factors that, directly or indirectly, cause changes in nature, anthropogenic assets, nature’s contributions to people and a good quality of life. Direct drivers of change can be both natural and anthropogenic. Direct drivers have direct physical (mechanical, chemical, noise, light etc.) and behaviour-affecting impacts on nature. They include, inter alia, climate change, pollution, different types of land use change, invasive alien species and zoonoses, and exploitation. Indirect drivers are drivers that operate diffusely by altering and influencing direct drivers, as well as other indirect drivers. They do not impact nature directly. Rather, they do it by affecting the level, direction or rate of direct drivers (IPBES online glossary).

Good quality of life: Within the context of the IPBES conceptual framework – the achievement of a fulfilled human life, a notion which may vary strongly across different societies and groups within societies. It is a context-dependent state of individuals and human groups, comprising aspects such as access to food, water, energy and livelihood security, and also health, good social relationships and equity, security, cultural identity, and freedom of choice and action. ‘Living in harmony with nature’, ‘living-well in balance and harmony with Mother Earth’ and ‘human well-being’ are examples of different perspectives on a ‘Good quality of life’ (IPBES online glossary).

Heuristic: A method of learning or solving problems that allows people to discover things themselves and learn from their own experiences (Cambridge Dictionary).

Indicators: A quantitative or qualitative factor or variable that provides a simple, measurable and quantifiable characteristic or attribute responding in a known and communicable way to a changing environmental condition, to a changing ecological process or function, or to a changing element of biodiversity (IPBES online glossary; Kim et al., 2023).

Intrinsic value: This concept refers to inherent value, that is the value something has independent of any human experience or evaluation. Such a value is viewed as an inherent property of the entity and not ascribed or generated by external valuing agents (Pascual et al., 2017).

Instrumental value: The value attributed to something as a means to achieving a particular end (Pascual et al., 2017).

Modelling community: Historically composed of primarily biodiversity and ecosystem services modellers but it is envisaged that the community is broadened to other sectoral and disciplinary modelling and narrative development groups, including social science and humanities and indigenous knowledge holders, to best develop nature futures scenarios.

Models: Qualitative or quantitative representations of key components of a system and of relationships between the components (IPBES online glossary; Kim et al., 2023).

Mother Earth: An expression used in a number of countries and regions to refer to the planet Earth and the entity that sustains all living things found in nature with which humans have an indivisible, interdependent physical and spiritual relationship (see ‘nature’) (IPBES online glossary).

Narratives (or scenario narratives): Qualitative descriptions of plausible future world evolutions, describing the characteristics, general logic and developments underlying a particular quantitative set of scenarios. Narratives are also referred to in the literature as “storylines” (IPCC, 2018).

Narrative family: The concept of Narrative Families has been developed to help people understand how narratives are related to diverse values, as well as the commonalities and differences between narratives. In particular, Narrative Families provide a structure for translating diverse values into more detailed descriptions of desirable futures (i.e. narratives) that can be easily understood by experts and non-experts alike. Narrative Families also provide a well-organised set of features that can be used by the scientific community and other stakeholders for developing qualitative or quantitative scenarios that are consistent with the Nature Futures Framework. They also offer a means of classifying NFF-based scenarios into groups with similar assumptions to facilitate synthesis for IPBES assessments (IPBES/MEP-Bureau/15/11).

Nature: In the context of IPBES, refers to the natural world with an emphasis on its living components. Within the context of western science, it includes categories such as biodiversity, ecosystems (both structure and functioning), evolution, the biosphere, humankind’s shared evolutionary heritage, and biocultural diversity. Within the context of other knowledge systems, it includes categories such as Mother Earth and systems of life, and it is often viewed as inextricably linked to humans, not as a separate entity (see ‘Mother Earth’) (IPBES online glossary).

Nature-based solutions: Actions to protect, conserve, restore, sustainably use and manage natural or modified terrestrial, freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems, which address social, economic and environmental challenges effectively and adaptively, while simultaneously providing human well-being, ecosystem services and resilience and biodiversity benefits (UNEP, 2021).

Nature’s contributions to people: Nature's contributions to people are all the contributions, both positive and negative, of living nature (i.e. diversity of organisms, ecosystems, and their associated ecological and evolutionary processes) to the quality of life for people. Beneficial contributions from nature include such things as food provision, water purification, flood control, and artistic inspiration, whereas detrimental contributions include disease transmission and predation that damages people or their assets. Many nature’s contributions to people may be perceived as benefits or detriments depending on the cultural, temporal or spatial context (IPBES online glossary).

Nature Futures: Future states of nature that ‘represent a wide range of human–nature interactions, based on the perspectives of different stakeholders, and include a variety of different types of human-modified ecosystems encompassing different degrees of human intervention’ (Rosa et al., 2017; Kim et al., 2023).

Nature futures framework, a flexible tool to support the development of scenarios and models of desirable futures for people, nature and Mother Earth (NFF): A heuristic that captures diverse, positive values of human-nature relationships along three types of specific value perspectives on nature: intrinsic (also known as ‘nature for nature’), instrumental (‘nature for society’), and relational (‘nature as culture/one with nature’) values. These values of nature are not mutually exclusive and intricately intertwined by nature. In the context of Western science, these positive values can be located in a triangular space whose tips represent the three types of value perspectives on nature (Pereira et al., 2020; Durán et al., 2023; Kim et al., 2023).

Pathways: Different strategies for moving from the current situation towards a desired future vision or set of specified targets. They are purposive courses of actions that build on each other, from short- term to long-term actions into broader transformation (Ferguson et al., 2013; Wise et al., 2014). The Three Horizons approach is often used to define such pathways in future visioning processes (Sharpe et al., 2016; Pereira et al., 2020).

Relational value: The values that contribute to desirable relationships, such as those among people or societies, and between people and nature, as in ‘Living in harmony with nature’ (IPBES/4/INF/13) (IPBES online glossary).

Scenarios: Representations of possible futures for one or more components of a system, particularly for drivers of change in nature and nature’s benefits, including alternative policy or management options (IPBES online glossary; Kim et al., 2023).

Scenario family: Scenarios that have a similar demographic, societal, economic and technical change storyline (IPCC glossary: Glossary of terms on the IPCC-Data Distribution Centre).

Specific values: Judgements regarding the importance of nature in particular contexts, grouped into instrumental values (i.e. means to a desired end often associated with the notion of “ecosystem services”), relational values (i.e. the meaningfulness of human-nature interactions) (IPBES, 2022).

Value: A principle or core belief underpinning rules and moral judgments. Values as principles vary from one culture to another and also between individuals and groups (IPBES/4/INF/13; Kim et al., 2023).

Visions: A desirable state in the future and therefore, a component of scenarios (the possible future states), demarcated from predictions (likely future states) and pathways (that lead up to the vision). Visions are usually seen as a desirable image of the future and can be defined as a compelling, inspiring statement of the preferred future that the authors and those who subscribe to the vision want to create (Wiek & Iwaniec, 2014; Pereira et al., 2020).

Visioning: “the process of creating a vision, i.e. a representation of a desirable future state, as opposed to scenario building (possible future states), forecasting (likely future states), and backcasting (pathways to desirable future states)” (Wiek & Iwaniec, 2014).