99th ESA Annual Meeting (August 10 -- 15, 2014)

SS 9

The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES): Natural and Social Scientists Collaborating at Global Scales

The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) was established in 2012 as an independent intergovernmental body dedicated to assessing the state of the planet's biodiversity, its ecosystems, and the essential services they provide to society. IPBES has four functions: 1) identify and prioritize key scientific information needed for policymakers and catalyze efforts to generate new knowledge by engaging relevant scientific, policy and funding organizations.; 2) perform regular and timely assessments of knowledge on biodiversity and ecosystem services and their interlinkages; 3) support policy formulation and implementation by identifying policy-relevant tools and methodologies; and 4) prioritize key capacity-building needs to improve the science-policy interface and catalyze related financing. As with IPCC’s efforts on climate change, IPBES will provide ESA members and other academic, NGO, government, and private-sector stakeholders important opportunities to support science-based environmental decision-making at global to local scales.

Speakers will describe IPBES history, structure, and governance, and ongoing assessments, including a thematic assessment of pollinators (subject of a separate workshop at this ESA meeting), and two methodology/policy-support-tool assessments (on valuation and scenario analysis/modeling). A workshop immediately following will allow attendees to introduce themselves and learn how they can contribute to IPBES efforts as expert panel members, contributors to assessments, and reviewers.

This session may also catalyze domestic environmental science-to-policy linkages; parallel to IPBES, the U.S. government has assembled a list of federal assessments, is developing a blueprint for a domestic assessment, and has built informatics platforms such as Ecoinforma, all of which could present rich collaborative opportunities.