We at SDU recently met with Håkan Berg from the Resilience and Development Programme (SwedBio) of Stockholm Resilience Centre. We  asked him three questions about his participation in a recent key meeting on IPBES, the new intergovernmental platform aimed at reversing the planet’s unprecedented loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Delegates from 112 countries, including two observers, five intergovernmental organizations, 33 non-governmental organizations, three conventions and ten UN bodies and specialized agencies, recently met in Nairobi with the intention to agree upon modalities and institutional arrangements for the establishment of IPBES. IPBES is short for the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and will in many (but not all) ways mirror the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). IPBES builds on the work of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and has the intention to further strengthen the science-policy interface by ensuring that decisions are made on the basis of the best available scientific information on biodiversity and ecosystem services.

”IPBES will help catalyzing improved understanding of biodiversity loss and its implications for human well-being. Hopefully, that will increase the political ambition to act in the same way as the IPCC has done for global warming”, says Håkan Berg, Senior Advisor at the Resilience and Development Programme (SwedBio) of Stockholm Resilience Centre.

We asked him three questions regarding his participation in the recent IPBES-meeting:

1) Which phase is the IPBES in right now?
“Definitely the end of the beginning. Hopefully, it will get the final green light during the next meeting in mid-April 2012. The legal basis and process for the formal establishment of IPBES was not fully resolved in Nairobi, but this will probably be solved during the next meeting.”

2) What was your role in Nairobi?
“I was part of the Swedish delegation invited by the Swedish Ministry of the Environment to participate and in particular follow the issues related to the function and structure of IPBES. Of special interest were the four working elements of the IPBES: knowledge generation; assessments; policy tools and methodologies; and capacity building. Within these I concentrated on, for example, how to include local and indigenous knowledge in ‘knowledge generation’ and how Sub Global Assessments* can provide an important mechanism for ‘capacity building’ in developing countries."

3) How will the Stockholm Resilience Centre interact in the future with the IPBES?
“I think that the work within the Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) and the Sub Global Assessment Network will be central processes to build on. Through these I hope the Centre can take part in developing new innovative ways for management and good governance of social ecological systems and developing interesting arenas – or interfaces – for better exchange between science, practice and other knowledge systems."

*The Sub Global Assessments were a part of the original Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) and continue to be an active network for practitioners involved in ecosystem assessments, supporting relevant global processes such as IPBES.