No Time to Lose! Time Lags in Biodiversity Science, Policy and Litigation

This paper exposes a significant mismatch between accelerating changes in nature and the science-policy-litigation process in biodiversity governance, due to procedural time lags and shifting baselines. Time lags accumulate throughout the procedural institutional making of science, policy and litigation. In a pressing context of acceleration of biodiversity loss and climate change impacts, such gaps could lead to a misalignment of well-intended policies and actions with environmental problems. On top of the accumulation of institutional and procedural time lags, biodiversity governance baselines and frames shift due to the personal experiences and standpoints of stakeholders, environmental generational amnesia and nostalgia, disciplinary framings, and the fragmentation of scientific knowledge. To minimise the impacts of temporal biases as well as procedural time lags in their practice and fields, stakeholders need to be equipped with tools at each step of the science-policy-litigation process.