2023

Tupala, Anna-Kaisa

Eco-crises appear as low-hanging dark clouds just before the storm – the collapse of critical ecosystems on Earth. Several scientific reports show we are at an alarming stage of biodiversity and climate issues. If we wish to live on planet Earth, we need immediate action to mitigate the negative impacts our current lifestyle has on nature. Achieving the global targets of nature conservation and ecosystem restoration requires alternative methods of implementation. One attempt to secure Earth’s ecological condition is a mitigation hierarchy. It is a decision-making framework supporting, among other things, conservation planning. The last step of the hierarchy, biodiversity offsetting, has played an important role in global nature conservation discussions for a couple of decades. While biodiversity offsetting and its methodological features are debated in academia, my dissertation focuses on a different aspect, individual people. Individual people, here called citizens, may have different roles, interests, and possibilities to conduct pro-biodiversity actions and participate in the sustainability transition. Procedurally, biodiversity offsetting offers very few options for citizen actors and simultaneously biodiversity offsetting poorly recognises social impacts caused by a development project or the setting of an offset area. Multidimensional nature relations in the current Finnish context provide insight into different actor roles of citizens regarding biodiversity questions and values represented in societies. The citizen potential for pro-biodiversity actions are framed through their attitudes and willingness for concrete actions, for example in private gardens. In this dissertation I clarify the gap between citizens’ potential and the space of action reserved for them in enhancing biodiversity and in biodiversity offsetting especially.