Scientists start preparing Brazil's biodiversity assessment

White paper to be issued in March 2016 by Brazilian members of IPBES aims to promote engagement by showing why biodiversity and ecosystem services are key to sustainable development.

By Karina Toledo 

Agência FAPESP – A diagnosis of Brazil’s biodiversity and associated ecosystem services will be issued in 2018 by Brazilian scientists belonging to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services (IPBES), established in April 2012 as an independent body open to all member countries of the United Nations to strengthen the dialogue between the scientific community and policy makers.

To offer guidance for the production of the report, engage the Brazilian academic community and interact with other sectors of society, this group of researchers affiliated with an array of institutions will publish a white paper in March 2016 explaining the reasons why such a diagnosis is key to sustainable development in Brazil.

The decision was made at an event held on November 5-6 in Indaiatuba, São Paulo State, which was attended by IPBES’s 25 Brazilian members.

The meeting was organized by FAPESP Research Program on Biodiversity Characterization, Conservation, Restoration and Sustainable Use (BIOTA) in partnership with the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC) and the Brazilian Sustainable Development Foundation (FBDS).

“Our aim in issuing the white paper will be to mobilize a large number of researchers to begin concrete work on producing the Brazilian biodiversity assessment. In a few pages and language that can easily be understood by the various sectors of society, it will briefly state our view on the main threats to biodiversity and ecosystem services in this country. And, it will point to the consequences of partial or complete loss of these resources on quality of life, highlighting the importance of conserving and in some cases restoring biodiversity,” said Carlos Alfredo Joly, a professor at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), coordinator of BIOTA, and co-chair of IPBES’s Multidisciplinary Expert Panel (MEP).

“During two days of hard work, we structured the teams and agreed on a framework for the Brazilian assessment based on the scoping document for the Americas proposed by IPBES,” said Tatiana Gadda, an urbanist at the Federal Technological University of Paraná (UTFPR).

According to Gadda, the group that will write the Brazilian diagnosis has started with the individuals involved in the regional assessment for the Americas and IPBES’s task forces. “This initial group will expand and is strongly committed to equitable participation relating to the Brazil region and gender. In addition, interdisciplinarity is another key factor in developing the diagnosis,” she said.

Joly explained that the Brazilian report will be ready at about the same time as the regional assessment, which will address biodiversity throughout the Americas and is being written by scientists from several countries. Other regional diagnoses will be issued at the same time for Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, and Central Asia.

All these reports will serve as inputs to the first global assessment of biodiversity and ecosystem services to be published in early 2019, along similar lines to reports issued every five years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 

“The initiative aims to build closer ties between the scientific community and decision makers. This kind of interaction isn’t promoted by the scientific articles we publish because they have to be written in very technical language and focus on specific issues. The IPBES assessments are an opportunity to translate the science into more accessible language. Furthermore, we’ll be able to select the most important topics via a critical analysis of this huge mass of information. They’ll be rather like executive summaries for policy makers to use in the most effective way possible,” said Jean Paul Metzger, a professor at the University of São Paulo’s Bioscience Institute (IB-USP) and a member of the IPBES team of experts who are preparing the regional assessment for the Americas.

Metzger also participated in writing the Methodological Assessment on Scenario Analysis & Modeling of Biodiversity, which is ready and will be submitted to the Fourth Plenary Session of IPBES in Malaysia in February 2016. Currently, he is a member of a group of experts from several countries who are developing the Thematic Assessment on Land Degradation & Restoration.

One important aspect of the white papers to Fabio Scarano, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and Executive Director of FBDS, is that the assessments issued by IPBES, unlike the IPCC’s reports, will not be based only on papers published in scientific journals. They will also take into account the traditional knowledge of local communities and indigenous peoples. 

“We want this traditional knowledge to be brought to light systematically so as to create a dialogue between it and scientific knowledge,” Scarano said.

To support this effort, the group that met in Indaiatuba included Helder Queiroz, Director of the Mamirauá Institute for Sustainable Development, and anthropologist Manuela Carneiro, a professor at the University of Chicago and an authority on the knowledge of indigenous peoples.

Methodology

The Brazilian assessment will be based on the same methodology, metrics and conceptual framework as IPBES’s regional assessments (available at www.ipbes.net/index.php/2-b-regional-subregional-assessments).

The document will be divided into six chapters with the following titles: “Setting the scene,” “The importance of ecosystem services to the quality of life,” “Status, trends and future dynamics of biodiversity and ecosystems underpinning ecosystem services,” “Direct and indirect drivers of changes in ecosystem services in the context of different sociocultural perspectives on the quality of life,” “Integrated and cross-scale analysis of interactions between the natural world and human society,” and “Options for governance, institutional arrangements and private and public decision-making across scales and sectors, including lessons learned.” 

“We plan to show how to best manage natural resources,” Scarano said. “We want to explain why conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services is at the heart of development concerns for Brazil. We would like this component, currently called environmental policy, to be part of a broader development policy rather than being seen as a sort of appendix, as it is now.”

The group does not want to wait until the assessment is ready in 2018 to begin a dialogue with government, private enterprise, the third sector and academia. “We want to start now,” Scarano said. “That’s why we plan to issue the white paper in March.”

According to Joly, the Brazilian assessment will link with the National Biodiversity Policy as well as policies on climate change management and sustainable development of traditional peoples and communities, water resources and sustainable cities, while also contributing to the movement for a change in the national development model.

“The key parameters will be the Aichi Biodiversity Targets,” Joly said. These are a set of 20 targets for 2020 agreed upon by the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (available at www.cbd.int/sp/targets). “We’re also basing our assessment on the Sustainable Development Goals recently approved by the United Nations.” The SDGs, adopted at the UN Sustainable Development Summit in September in New York, comprise 17 goals with 169 targets and covered a broad range of sustainable development issues. These include ending poverty and hunger, making cities more sustainable, combating climate change, and protecting oceans and forests. They are to be achieved over the next 15 years and succeed the Millennium Development Goals.