Symposium on Multispecies Cultural Niche Construction for Biodiversity Recovery
Turku + VIDEOS
Protected areas alone are not enough to halt biodiversity loss and enable its recovery. We must also protect biodiversity on private and public lands used for economic purposes, as current sectoral laws have not adequately addressed these needs. The European Union’s Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 and the Law on Nature Restoration are ambitious, but significant efforts to restore biodiversity depend on strategic policymaking, collaboration, and voluntary actions. Therefore, land use planning and nature-based solutions adopted on various scales will become crucial for protecting biodiversity on these lands.
The Strategic Research Council Programme Environmental and Social Links to Biodiversity Loss (BIOD) has arranged several meetings with the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry at the Ministry of Environment on biodiversity recovery. Many important aspects of biodiversity recovery have been brought up in these meetings. In one of the meetings, one participant pointed out that we need to understand better the ecological niche of land use planning amongst the intertwined sectoral laws affecting land use and productive practices on private lands. Indeed, land use planning, especially strategic land use planning, navigates through the complex interfaces of sectoral laws and policies and their legal and social interpretations. The emergence of the “niche construction” concept has been one of the key outcomes of these meetings. Participants considered it worth further exploring.
In April 2025, the BIOD Programme joined forces with our project to organise a “Multispecies Cultural Niche Construction for Biodiversity Recovery” symposium initiated and motivated by discussions with two ministries. In the two-day symposium, we concentrated on cultural niche construction to scrutinise the role of humans and other species in moulding the settings and circumstances of the everyday living environment and the consequent evolutionary conditions and co-evolutionary potential for humans and other species. Niche construction refers to situations and conditions where the organism influences its evolution by being both the object of natural selection and the creator of the conditions of that selection. Philosopher Joseph Rouse (Social practices as biological niche construction, Chicago University Press, 2023, p. 55) has written about it thus: “The evolution and development of human bodies, skills and languages are best understood as coevolving forms of niche construction… Niche construction is the key process that both allows and requires incorporating social practices within a more expansive ecological-developmental conception of human development and evolution (p.69)”.
In our symposium, we showed a diverse interest in cultural niche construction. From our unique perspectives, we explored how the concept could be used to understand and change biodiversity protection and recovery conditions. We had presentations on food production and acro-ecology, where the interlinkages between human activities and the ecological base of these activities are at the core. In another set of presentations, niche construction was applied in the context of maritime and river fisheries. The third key area of our exploratory work focused on urban development and urban land use planning to enable biodiversity recovery using nature-based solutions. The concept of niche construction is still rarely applied in these contexts. Moreover, niche construction is rarely applied across cultural and ecological contexts, and it is especially rare to focus on their coevolutionary potential.
We started with two keynote presentations. First, Professor Carsten Herrmann-Pillath (evolutionary economist, University of Erfurt, Germany) presented “Cultural niche construction as more-than-human infrastructural landscaping” continued by postdoctoral researcher Roope Kaaronen (multidisciplinary human scientist, University of Helsinki) with “Niche construction and cumulative cultural evolution: combinatorial innovation and its consequences, from past to present”. Unfortunately, our third keynote speaker senior lecturer Panu Halme (ecologist and evolutionary biologist, University of Jyväskylä) caught cold and could not come. All the presentations are available online. Below are the links to the keynote videos and PDFs of the presentations. Please contact the author with other questions or concerns about the niche construction.
Watch the videos of the keynote presentations and read all the other presentations HERE.