From Scenarios toward Transformation: A Transdisciplinary Foresight Approach for Biodiversity Futures in Coffee-Dominated Landscapes in Ethiopia

Landscapes in the global south are undergoing rapid change due to factors such as agricultural expansion and broader remote influences. These changes often lead to biodiversity loss and increased uncertainty, especially in highly biodiverse and food-insecure regions. Addressing these challenges requires transdisciplinary foresight approaches to systematically explore potential landscape changes and co-design sustainable pathways for biodiversity conservation. This means moving beyond exploring scenarios to identifying a desirable future and co-designing pathways to achieve it. However, most existing work focuses on developing scenarios and linking them to visioning and co-designing transformative pathways for biodiversity conservation, particularly in sub-Saharan African landscapes is misisng. This study addresses this gap by integrating scenario development, visioning, and backcasting in the biodiversity-rich coffee landscapes of Jimma zone, southwest Ethiopia. It aims to identify plausible future trajectories, examine stakeholder visions, and co-design transformative strategies to guide the landscape toward a biodiversity-supported future. To achieve these, a transdisciplinary foresight approach integrating participatory scenario planning, visioning, and backcasting, with the Three Horizons framework, was used. Three rounds of participatory workshops were held with over 200 stakeholders, including local communities and government representatives. Together, stakeholders explored system dynamics and uncertainties, developed plausible landscape futures for 2050, articulated shared visions, and identified pathways for a biodiversity-supported future. Four plausible scenarios were identified for the study landscape. Three scenarios emphasized increasing agricultural production efficiency through intensification, specialization, and market integration, resulting in limited support for biodiversity conservation. In contrast, one scenario integrated biodiversity conservation into agricultural land using the biosphere model and an agroecological, biodiversity-supporting system. Stakeholders envisioned that the future of their landscape should reflect the biosphere reserve scenario. However, preferences differed regarding pathways, especially in farming techniques: higher-level stakeholders prioritized intensification, while local actors favored diversified agroecological pathways to support biodiversity. The subsequent stakeholders' deliberation and co-design process enabled reconciling these differences by co-developing 10 landscape principles that guide future outcomes. Our approach demonstrates that a place-based, transdisciplinary foresight that integrates scenario planning with visioning and backcasting, using different methods, can reconcile competing landscape priorities, promote shared vision, and map coherent pathways toward a future landscape that supports biodiversity conservation.