Decades of research and policy interventions on biodiversity have insufficiently addressed the dual issues of biodiversity degradation and social justice. New approaches are therefore needed. We devised a research and action agenda that calls for a collective task of revisiting biodiversity toward the goal of sustaining diverse and just futures for life on Earth. Revisiting biodiversity involves critically reflecting on past and present research, policy, and practice concerning biodiversity to inspire creative thinking about the future. The agenda was

Across energy, agricultural and forestry landscapes, the production of biomass for energy has emerged as a controversial driver of land-use change. We present a novel, simple methodology, to probe the potential global sustainability limits of bioenergy over time for energy provision and climate change mitigation using a complexsystems approach for assessing land-use dynamics. Primary biomass that could provide between 70 EJ year À1 and 360 EJ year , globally, by 2050 was simulated in the context of different land-use futures, food diet patterns and climate change mitigation efforts. Our simulations also show ranges of potential greenhouse gas emissions for agriculture, forestry and other land uses by 2050, including not only above-ground biomass-related emissions, but also from changes in soil carbon, from as high as 24 GtCO 2 eq year À1 to as low as minus 21GtCO 2 eq year À1 , which would represent a significant source of negative emissions. Based on the modelling simulations, the discussions offer novel insights about bioenergy as part of a broader integrated system. Whilst there are sustainability limits to the scale of bioenergy provision, they are dynamic over time, being responsive to land management options deployed worldwide.

Numerous models have been developed to aid in the decision making process to identify the most suitable energy provision options for a given community or area. Some models focus strictly on one key planning aspect, such as cost or technology (single-criteria decision analysis), while other models take multiple criteria into consideration, such as cost and technology, social, human and environmental factors (multi-criteria analysis). This chapter aims to show that the inclusion of multiple technical and non-technical criteria can lead to more sustainable development outcomes. To do so, it provides a comparison between several single factor and multi-criteria models, highlighting their applications and limitations in the context of rural energy planning in developing countries. This is followed by a discussion of the factors that should be considered to ensure optimal service provision,, long-term sustainability of rural electrification projects and poverty alleviation. The subsequent section introduces and analyses the components of the Sustainable Rural Energy Decision Support System (SURE-DSS) approach and methodology. The novelty of the SURE tool lies in its objective to match rural community's energy needs in developing countries to appropriate technologies and thereby improve livelihoods and project sustainability. The chapter explains the approach and illustrates the tool's application through a case study in Colombia.

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