Environmental Futures – Advancing Mutual Human-Nature Relationships

Scholarship in futures studies and foresight has increasingly addressed environmental factors as drivers of socioecological change and related implications for the well-being of future generations. Faced with the accelerating climatic and biodiversity crisis, a mere descriptive analysis and monitoring effort of past and present ecological decline appears insufficient to maintain the livelihood of humans and non-humans in the Anthropocene. From environmental assessment research and related strategic planning efforts, a variety of anticipatory methods have emerged to create, analyze and enact alternative images of human-nature relationships of the future. Initiated in the geo-, eco- and environmental/sustainability sciences as predominantly natural scientific research communities, this epistemic, methodical and also sociocultural diversification of environmental futures research has more recently entered new fields, like the human and social sciences as in the environmental humanities, science and technology studies (STS) or futures studies, and the arts and creative fields as in art- and design-based research or art-as-research practices. Between these fields and disciplines, new inter- and transdisciplinary ways of conceiving, creating and applying images of environmental futures have been emerging, transcending disciplinary boundaries and blending academic and non-academic ways of theoretical and applied knowledge-making. From the multi-field perspective of futures studies, this motivates a structured effort to explore, map and display the current dynamics of environmental futures research and discourse in the light of evolving practices, frameworks, projects and research structures within the scope of this special issue.