To secure more ethical and more effective approaches for nature conservation in the Global South, social equity needs to be integrated as a key aspect in environmental governance, by for instance recognizing and giving way to transparent and participatory approaches that can capture the diversity of stakes and worldviews about human-nature relations. This necessarily requires that valuation of biodiversity (a shorthand for nature or any biotic system as seen by science, or other knowledge systems including those of indigenous local knowledge (Diaz et al., 2015) is socially equitable. This implies (i) acknowledging three main issues: recognition of worldviews, guaranteeing transparent participation of stakeholders, and being mindful of the distributional impacts of valuation-based decisions. EQUIVAL provides the seed for a highly ambitious future transdisciplinary (interdisciplinary and participatory) project that will seek to develop an Atlas of on-the ground valuation processes in the global South to understand the impact on nature of equitable valuation processes as well as the opportunities and challenges these processes face under varying social-ecological conditions. EQUIVAL will co-design the key inputs for this future endeavour including a first version of the Atlas by means of a catalogue based on up to 30 case studies from the Global South and a set of indicators that can connect the extent of equity in valuation and effective conservation. This will form the backbone of a co-designed research proposal and information that will be shared with various stakeholders including scientists, NGOs, end-users, including indigenous peoples, policy makers focused on nature conservation-poverty reduction nexus, across administrative scales and intergovernmental science-policy organizations such as the Intergovernmental Platform of Nature and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).