After three years of work, our project has reached the halfway house. Our funding for the second three-year phase was recently granted, and now is the time to assess our results. This is the first in a series of three blog posts sharing our key learnings from the project so far, looking at the role of education and how we learn. This post will be followed by another, exploring how to support a fairer distribution of urban nature for multispecies. The final post, in turn, will discuss how more inclusive, cross-sectoral governance can better represent the needs of the rest of nature.

The challenge in education

Teachers across primary, secondary and higher education face a common struggle: how do you help students genuinely engage with biodiversity loss? Young people’s sense of agency in relation to environmental and societal changes is low, and they share a feeling of not being heard. The forms of agency and activism available to them seem as either trivial (recycling) or beyond their reach (becoming the next Greta Thunberg).

Part of what’s missing is a sense of shared agency. By this, we mean that firstly, young people are not alone as individuals but responsibility and action are shared intergenerationally and tackled as communities. And secondly, humans aren’t the only ones shaping our environments; other species have their own roles, needs and ways of being that deserve to be heard. We need broader engagement with conceptual and practical approaches and ways of talking about biodiversity loss and other ecological and societal issues. These modes of communication and learning recognise how human wellbeing is interconnected with the needs of other species, and, at the same time, highlight the intrinsic worth of more-than-human beings and the rest of nature.

What we are doing about it

MUST brings together researchers from biodiversity and ecojustice education, social sciences, soundscape ecology, and environmental governance to co-design ways of learning about multispecies justice – the idea that other living beings and ecosystems have justice concerns and ought to be considered as subjects.

One of our key tools is the MUST Platform: an immersive audio-visual experience that lets users explore biodiversity through sound and image. We’ve used it with around 150 secondary school students in Tampere, combining real-world nature walks with virtual ones inside the platform. We have also tested smaller scale activities, e.g. by arranging an inclusive puppet-making workshop which invited participants to reflect on the different ways living beings of various species exist. The workshop was built around simple questions: “which beings are easily seen and heard? Which ones get trampled underfoot by others, and what consequences can this have for those who go unnoticed?” From this experience, participants came away with a stronger sense of which species share their local environments as well as how to begin to ”listen” to their concerns.

In January 2026, we took these ideas to the international stage. At the Tournefeuille Model United Nations (TOUMUN) – a student-led conference bringing together six schools from four European countries – youth delegations were trained to act as rights of nature delegations in multilateral negotiations. MUST researchers and rangers from the Pyrenees National Park guided the students through this exercise in representing the interests of species and ecosystems.

Beyond the classroom

Our research and collaboration efforts support the creation of a new teacher education curriculum in Finland that recognizes new processes and practices for engaging with the multispecies needs in everyday decision-making. Teachers play a crucial role in introducing multispecies pedagogies in schools. Our work, however, also reaches beyond schools.

We have organized multiple multispecies justice themed workshops and writing retreats as well as science-policy dialogues called MUST Forums, which help us learn how environmental policy makers understand multispecies justice, and how to create new concrete methods to address multispecies needs.

We’ve also hosted immersive festival events for general audiences in Tampere, Turku and Lappeenranta – helping city residents and other local experts discover and connect to the needs of the species sharing their urban green spaces. For example, at the MUST Festival in Turku, we created learning activities for urban residents to explore the park with the help of squirrels, butterflies, seagulls, and dandelions as tour guides.

Throughout the project, we’ve collaborated with researchers, teachers and various environmental actors in Australia, Indonesia, Portugal, Namibia and India. Collaboration with the University of Namibia through the co-design of multispecies approaches in teacher education and organising youth diplomacy simulations integrating rights of nature and multispecies justice approaches in transfrontier conservation governance have further provided insights into the importance of youth-led approaches in reimagining multispecies governance futures.

What we’re learning

Communicating multispecies justice concerns is not an easy task. Environmental planners are trained in the language of ecological indicators and threatened species lists – not in frameworks that centre the perspectives and relationships of non-human beings. We’ve found that anchoring conversations in familiar, local species and habitats helps: a flying squirrel is a more effective entry point than an abstract principle.

We’re also finding that this work requires patience across disciplines. Ecologists, education researchers, geographers and policymakers each bring different assumptions about what biodiversity means and what the future should look like. However, collaboration between professionals from different fields has helped us find points of connection and develop future collaboration efforts.

The goal is an education system – and a public culture – that treats other species not as resources or problems to be managed, but as neighbours worth listening to.

This is the first of three posts sharing the key points from the impact stories from our project. Each impact story describes a societal challenge and gives examples of concrete changes or solutions we have proposed as well as how our research and interactions have contributed to achieving them. We feel like these blog posts are a perfect opportunity to share concrete steps we have taken so far to achieve the multispecies transitions. Also, Impact stories are a major part of reporting, monitoring and evaluation of projects funded by the Strategic Research Council (SRC).

Text: Margarita Kondakova (University of Helsinki), Sinianna Kuosmanen (Demos Helsinki), Kari Jalonen (Demos Helsinki), Maria Helena Saari (University of Oulu)

Photos: Maria Helena Saari (University of Oulu)