Biodiversity Policy for Environmental Governance

The complex threat to biodiversity that we currently experience has become not only a global scientific and citizen concern, but also a reflection of political systems that have not been able to advance solutions commensurate with the magnitude of the environmental problem. Referring in the present to the imperative protection of biodiversity, is to assume the need to integrate variables of interdisciplinary realities that mobilize decision makers to assume the challenge of a new environmental governance. In fact, in interrelated societies and with a high technological and cultural interdependence, the discussion and approach of biodiversity is beyond the merely scientific. Or even better, from the scientific point of view, we cannot ignore the weight of political decisions and public policies that are involved to try to reverse alarming indicators that weigh on species, ecosystems and communities affected, for example, by climate change. Science and politics have coexisted, even, since before the formalization and institutionalization of both, in societies that require orientations and wellfounded decisions to advance and achieve the common good. However, this coexistence is stressed in modernity when, beyond the resources that these national budgets grant to the scientific world, said scientific sphere rises in a persistent awareness of change that bothers politics and power as a whole. The context of COVID showed us that when coordinated work between science and politics is not achieved, the results can be disastrous for the sectors that suffer the greatest vulnerability, including environmental vulnerability [1]. However, there is a virtuous transmission belt between the scientific and political worlds that can legitimize a transformation in human behavior to curb decisions that threaten ecosystems [2,3].

In favor of respect for biodiversity, the public incidence of citizens who manage to impact political powers without environmental awareness, as well as the socialization of public governmental and/or private campaigns that seek to generate cultural changes in a broad set of the world population, we show two ways of expressing communications that can be complementary and equally important. Communications, understood here as bidirectional processes of transmission and reception of messages from micro-interpersonal and macromedia spheres that act on the construction of social reality, can operate together with other conventions and norms in the achievement of a long-awaited ecological persuasion. That is, facilitator of new levels of information, dissemination, awareness and transformation among the global members of a historical moment that requires a pro-biodiversity turning point. In order for society as a whole to be able to address these problems and challenges, it is extremely important to process the ways in which environmental threats are communicated. When it is not possible to find adequate formulas to communicate these problems, ecological communication is usually associated with a message of fear that generates anguish, which is why it is immediately associated with a catastrophic approach. An empathetic and efficient communication focused on the care of that biodiversity at risk, must be at the center of public actions for governance with an environmental sense.

Indeed, socio-environmental problems and environmental equity require great attention on the part of governance and the communication processes that it promotes, being able to involve different actors with the aim of reaching viable and sustainable solutions in the future [4]. Conflict resolution on an environmental scale needs a look from political ecology, in which governance grants the transfer of power to decision-making by those actors that are directly related to these crises and generates the respective instances of dialogue. On the other hand, understanding that not all systems are resilient [5], it is currently possible to observe that socio-natural disasters are one of the main obstacles to the development of territories, especially in areas of the Global South. Added to the difficult geographical, geological and meteorological conditions is an economic model based on the extraction of goods, environmental degradation and the absence of risk-based territorial planning [6], which is affecting the biodiversity of vulnerable areas. In addition, global environmental change must be considered, which is producing extreme events in certain periods and regions of the world. Finally, if the “transition to a society in balance with ecological systems implies far-reaching and longterm social, economic and cultural transformations” [7], will it be possible to have a governance that from the political point of view can lead and manage the environmental complexity to protect the planet’s biodiversity?

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