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Today's increasingly unequal and resource intensive development model degrades and surpasses Earth's finite capacity to sustain human well-being. Society must restore this capacity and adapt to it without surrendering hard won development gains while also honoring the rightful aspirations of poorer nations and people to enjoy better living standards, according to the UNEP report "Making Peace with Nature". This article presents findings from the report and reflections on how to take advantage of the 50 years of experience gained since the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. The interconnected environmental emergencies of climate change, loss of biodiversity and pollution need to be addressed together. International scientific assessments are providing the knowledge base for informed evidence-based decision-making, but none of the internationally agreed environmentally targets for climate and biodiversity have been met and the situation is becoming more dire with each passing year. Unless these issues are addressed in the next 5–10 years none of the 2030 sustainable development goals will be achieved. Human knowledge, ingenuity, technology and cooperation need to be mobilized in such an effort. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals provides a blueprint for the transformation. The international environmental governance structure needs to facilitate a system-wide cross-sectoral transformation of humankind's relationship with nature. Transformed economic, financial and productive systems can lead and power the shift to sustainability. Major shifts in investment and regulation are key to just and informed transformations that overcome inertia and opposition from vested interests. Government actions at all levels are needed together with strengthened actions by all actors in society and the next decade is critical.

This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of the AAAS for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Science 359(6373) on 19/01/2018, DOI:10.1126/science.aap8826 ; A major challenge today and into the future is to maintain or enhance beneficial contributions of nature to a good quality of life for all people. This is among the key motivations of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a joint global effort by governments, academia, and civil society to assess and promote knowledge of Earth's biodiversity and ecosystems and their contribution to human societies in order to inform policy formulation. One of the more recent key elements of the IPBES conceptual framework (1) is the notion of nature's contributions to people (NCP), which builds on the ecosystem service concept popularized by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) (2). But as we detail below, NCP as defined and put into practice in IPBES differs from earlier work in several important ways. First, the NCP approach recognizes the central and pervasive role that culture plays in defining all links between people and nature. Second, use of NCP elevates, emphasizes, and operationalizes the role of indigenous and local knowledge in understanding nature's contribution to people. ; PLEASE READ BEFORE VALIDATING: Licence unknown. Brighton University Repository on their webpage for this output https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/publications/assessing-natures-contributions-to-people they have the author's accepted manuscript with the following bibliographical note "This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of the AAAS for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Science 359(6373) on 19/01/2018, DOI:10.1126/science.aap8826". Contacted Brighton repository for informatio about the licence and if it was specifically for their repository and they replied "I don't think it specifically said - I think the risk is very low of including it in your IR. From memory I think it was a generic statement and permission was not directly sought as their policy covered self-archiving in IRs as long as the statement was included.". Also, accoridng to Sherpa Romeo https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/id/publication/11114, the accepted manuscript can be deposited without embargo. Should we also upload it in ours with this disclaimer? CBoula, 10/11/2021 OK, will do so, will add disclaimer to a note field in repositoroy RVO