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Forests, Futures, and the Quiet Architecture of Transition: Signals from the political and legal domain of the emerging bioeconomy

  • Writer: Y'ael Vorster
    Y'ael Vorster
  • Nov 14
  • 8 min read

Updated: Nov 18

“No way was clear, no light unbroken, in the forest. Into wind, water, sunlight, starlight, there always entered leaf and branch, bole and root, the shadowy, the complex.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest

The Forest Futures Cone (2025) Y'ael Vorster [Digital Artwork]
The Forest Futures Cone (2025) Y'ael Vorster [Digital Artwork]

I remember the first time I walked a section of old-growth forest between plantations marked for audit—an early career project I hadn’t expected to change me in the way it did. The light filtered through the canopy in long, slanted pillars, illuminating dust motes and insect wings and the slow exhale of soil. To the untrained eye, it was simply a forest. But the deeper I moved into the understorey, the more the forest revealed itself as something else entirely: a living intelligence of relationships, feedback loops, ecological bargains struck over millennia.


Yet my notebook told a different story. It demanded measurements—timber yield, canopy cover, certification indicators. What I saw with my body, my breath, my senses was not what the audit template saw. The template spoke in abstractions: risk, compliance, value. The forest spoke in presence, reciprocity, time.


Somewhere between those two languages lies the political and legal domain of our transition to the new bioeconomy. It is a domain defined not only by parliaments and treaties, but by the quieter architectures—monetary policy, reporting standards, accounting frameworks—that determine what becomes legible, investable, permissible. This is the domain where futures take shape in forms so technical they can almost escape notice.


Today, those architectures are shifting. And the signals emerging from that shift—some subtle, some seismic—tell us much about the futures that may yet be possible.

 

The forest as a preview of the political domain

Forests have always been political terrain. They sit at the intersection of sovereignty, market demand, Indigenous rights, climate regulation, and the deep time of ecological succession. Standing in a section of old-growth forest being ‘used’ as a firebreak between endless lines of pine trees, I realised that governance is never abstract: it infiltrates soil, flows through water tables, vibrates along the mycelial networks that bind one tree’s fate to another.


Which is why the recent announcement of the Forestry Natural Capital Project, led by the International Sustainable Forestry Coalition and the Capitals Coalition, feels symbolically important. The project aims to measure and value the ecosystem services of over 23 million hectares of forest—a scale large enough that its accounting choices will ripple outward into global markets.


Natural capital accounting isn’t new, but its political meaning is changing. The question used to be: How do we value what the market overlooks? Now the question has become: Whose valuation systems will define the future bioeconomy?


The difference between those questions is enormous. It marks the shift from technical reform to geopolitical terrain.


Signals in the architecture of value

If you listen carefully, you can hear a new cadence in the institutional world—a subtle realignment happening beneath headlines and political cycles. Some of these changes are still forming, like the early stirrings of a weather system on the horizon.


Signal One: ISSB turns toward nature

The International Sustainability Standards Board—the body many investors now treat as the global reference point for corporate disclosures—has confirmed that it will develop a standard for nature-related risks and opportunities, explicitly drawing on the TNFD’s LEAP approach.


In political terms, this is a major inflection point. It is not simply about measurement. It is about the consolidation of authority.


When ISSB takes up a topic, it tends to normalise it. And normalisation is one of the most powerful political acts there is. Once nature-related financial exposure becomes a standardised category—no longer an optional disclosure—then boardrooms, insurers, asset managers, and yes, central banks, must incorporate it. The risk becomes systemic by virtue of being named.


In futures terms, this signal suggests a world where nature is no longer external to economic governance. Ecology becomes a recognised domain of fiduciary duty.


Signal Two: A Nature Measurement Protocol emerges

Just as significant is the announcement that a coalition of actors—including the Nature Positive Initiative, Capitals Coalition, WBCSD, GRI, and TNFD—will co-develop a Nature Measurement Protocol.


For years, the field has been crowded with competing metrics and incompatible methodologies. But this collaboration hints at a shift: the emergence of a shared measurement “grammar” for nature.


Grammars matter. They shape what can be said, what can be seen, what counts as evidence. A global protocol for nature measurement would effectively establish the epistemic architecture for the bioeconomy. It would set the parameters for what investors, regulators, and companies consider meaningful, material, real.


But every grammar is also a gate. A universal metric can clarify, but it can also flatten. The political question is: Will this protocol make room for Indigenous knowledge systems and relational values? Or will it codify a narrower technocratic worldview?


The futures implied by these pathways diverge sharply.


Signal Three: The central banks enter the biome

The political domain is often imagined as parliamentary chambers, ministerial offices, and multilateral negotiation halls. But in truth, some of the most consequential decisions for the bioeconomy are being made in the halls of central banks and supervisory authorities—spaces not typically associated with ecology.


Yet here, too, the signals are clear.


The Network for Greening the Financial System has published frameworks showing how biodiversity loss can generate macro-financial risk—including credit exposure, collateral degradation, and supply-chain disruption. This is a profound reframing: the idea that ecological collapse is not only an environmental crisis, but a monetary one.


Once central banks acknowledge a category of risk, the machinery of governance begins to shift: stress-testing methodologies evolve; collateral frameworks are reconsidered; prudential expectations tighten. The boundaries of what counts as “sound finance” change.


This quiet shift signals a future in which the biosphere becomes a domain of monetary governance, rather than a backdrop to it.


Immediately, the forest in my memory becomes newly legible: not merely a site of ecological wonder, but a balance-sheet question, a systemic-risk question, a political question.


What is at stake is not whether we price nature perfectly—an impossible task—but whether our monetary and regulatory infrastructures continue to treat ecological collapse as an externality, or recognise it as a core determinant of economic stability.


Signal Four: The resistance that reveals the stakes

Into this intricate architecture comes a signal of a different frequency: the rising force of Indigenous protest and mobilisation, especially in the lead-up to and during COP30 in Belém, Brazil. Indigenous leaders from across the Amazon have demanded to be admitted into negotiation halls, asserting that treaties about forests such as the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), cannot proceed without the forest’s original custodians.


Their mobilisation has become what in futures we refer to as a ‘Turner’—an event or force capable of shifting trajectories rather than merely reinforcing them. And like all Turners, it exposes a deeper truth: the future bioeconomy is not simply a technical project. It is a contest over whose knowledge counts, whose rights are respected, whose cosmologies are permitted to shape global policy.


When Indigenous peoples demand access, they are not merely seeking inclusion. They are challenging the epistemic foundations of existing governance frameworks.


Listening closely, I hear:

The forest’s value cannot be measured without the forest’s peoples.


This is the fundamental political question of the decade.


The emerging governance constellation

Taken together, these signals form a constellation:

  • The ISSB’s move into nature.

  • The creation of a Nature Measurement Protocol.

  • The scaling of natural capital accounting through forestry pilots.

  • The incorporation of biodiversity into central-bank risk frameworks.

  • The intensifying political agency of Indigenous nations.

  • The expansion of frameworks like CSRD, CSDDD, EU Taxonomy, GRI, SBTN, SDGs, GBF, TEEB, SEEA, CICES.


This constellation illuminates several emerging futures.


Plausible Biodiversity Futures Scenarios


Futures Scenario One: Alignment and consolidation

In this trajectory, the major frameworks converge into a coherent architecture. Nature-related risks become standardised. Corporates adopt harmonised metrics. Central banks integrate biodiversity into macroprudential regimes. Natural capital accounting evolves into a global baseline.


The bioeconomy becomes legible, investable, governable.


But the risk is technocracy: a clean, data-driven future that succeeds on measurement but falters on meaning.


Futures Scenario Two: Fragmentation and rollback

Here, political backlash disrupts progress. Regulatory frameworks weaken. Disclosure regimes become voluntary. Natural capital pilots struggle to scale. Central banks retreat from nature-related risks in the face of ideological pressure.


The forest returns to being an externality, invisible again in the architecture of value.


Futures Scenario Three: Plural and justice-centred transformation

This scenario grows from the Turner-energy of Indigenous mobilisation.


Metrics evolve to include relational values. Global frameworks embed free, prior, and informed consent. Central banks recognise the stability provided by Indigenous stewardship. The bioeconomy becomes a plural, multi-world system, where stewardship is not a market product but a governance principle.


In this future, the forest is no longer reduced to service flows or carbon stocks. It is recognised as a living actor in its own right, with political standing.


This is the scenario that feels most alive. The scenario most attuned to the lessons that forests teach.


The forest returns to the story

As I think back to that early forest walk, I realise that the dissonance I felt—the mismatch between what my body knew and what my audit template required—was not a personal tension. It was a structural one.


The transition to the bioeconomy is not about inventing new technologies or frameworks, but about rewriting the terms of recognition—reshaping the legal, monetary, and epistemic infrastructures through which we understand nature, value, and responsibility.


This transition requires narrative courage.


It requires us to bring the forest back into the room.


A call to those holding the pen

The political and legal domain is where futures crystallise. It is where the quiet work of definition, disclosure, and duty becomes the scaffolding of entire economies. And it is where we now face a choice: will the emerging bioeconomy reproduce the abstractions that once rendered nature invisible, or will it make space for a richer, more embodied plurality of knowledge?


This is where Facilitated Emergence® enters—not as the centrepiece, but as a practice for designing conditions, building relational architectures, and inviting more-than-human wisdom into the rooms where futures are shaped.


The transition ahead is not only technical. It is ecological, relational, and ultimately, civilisational.


And like the forest, it requires us to listen differently.

 

Bibliography

 

Global Governance, Frameworks & Standards

  • Capitals Coalition (2016). Natural Capital Protocol.

  • CBD (2022). Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

  • European Commission (2022). Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).

  • European Commission (2024). Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).

  • European Parliament & Council (2020). EU Taxonomy Regulation (EU 2020/852).

  • Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). GRI Standards.

  • IFRS Foundation / ISSB (2025). Nature-related standards announcements.

  • Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) and Science Based Targets Network (SBTN). Official guidance.

  • TEEB (2007–2011). Main Reports & Synthesis Documents.

  • TFFF - Tropical Forest Forever Facility (no date) https://tfff.earth/. Available at: https://tfff.earth/.

  • United Nations (2015). Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Nature Measurement, Valuation & Accounting

  • ‘CICES - Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services’ (no date). Available at: https://cices.eu/.

  • SEEA - System of Environmental Economic Accounting (no date). Available at: https://seea.un.org/.

Central Banks & Nature-Related Financial Risk

  • Network for Greening the Financial System (2022–2023). Statements & conceptual frameworks on nature-related risk.

  • CPR Asset Management (2025). “Central Banks and Biodiversity.”

Sectoral Initiatives

  • International Sustainable Forestry Coalition & Capitals Coalition (2025). Forestry Natural Capital Project announcements.

  • Nature Positive Initiative et al. (2025). Nature Measurement Protocol collaboration announcements.

  • TNFD (2023–2025). TNFD Recommendations & Updates.

Indigenous Leadership, Justice & Governance

©2025 Y'ael Vorster. Facilitated Emergence® and Narrative Architecture™ are shared under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence. Non-commercial use with attribution only. 

 

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