A gathering of 85 member countries of the UN has set in the motion plans to create an international body for monitoring the state of global biodiversity. It is hoped that the proposed ‘Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’ (IPBES) will unite and streamline biodiversity research and monitoring from countries around the globe.

Ecosystem Services

The overall role of the IPBES will be to conduct periodic assessments of Earth’s biodiversity and ‘ecosystem services’. These include ecosystems outputs such as fresh water, fish, game and timber as well as the stability or otherwise of the climate. These assessments will be used to answer questions about how much biodiversity is declining and what the implications of extinctions and ecosystem change might be for humanity.

Resource Sharing

The actual scope of the body will be much larger, with a focus on uniting research groups around the world and increasing knowledge and resource sharing. The IPBES will help to train environmental scientists in the developing world, both with a budget of its own and by alerting funders to gaps in global expertise. The organization will also identify gaps in research and highlight tools, such as models, for policy-makers looking to apply a scientific approach to decisions on issues such as land management.

The IPBES will operate along similar lines as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Although the latter has come in for some criticism lately over dubiously apocalyptic claims about the Himalayan glaciers, there is no doubting the good work it as done for research into Climate Change.

Anne Larigauderie, executive director of Paris-based Diversitas, a facilitator for biodiversity science, says that the IPBES could turn the “fragmented” field of biodiversity research into a more coordinated “common enterprise” that will lead to better models of future biodiversity changes.

Lean and Mean and Streamlined

Negotiations stretched late into the night as delegates debated the scope of the IPBES and how it would be funded. A key concern among developed countries was that the body should “not become a huge bureaucracy,” says Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program. “Governments wanted to be reassured that it would be lean and mean and streamlined.”

Although at the moment, the name IPCC has become synonymous with debates over climate change sceptics, deniers, scaremongers and believers, bodies such as this could prove to be the unifying and unilateral force that will be required in the future if real action does need to be taken.