Biodiversity in a Rapidly Changing World: How to Manage and Use Information?

Abstract

Biodiversity science has been evolving quickly and moved from a focus on systematics and taxonomy in the 1970–80s, to a more dynamic view of biodiversity’s role in ecosystem functioning throughout the 1990s. The early 2000s have placed biodiversity within the context of ecosystem services and human well-being, and some efforts are currently focusing on putting this concept into practice, and on valuing and mapping ecosystem services in order to shed light on economic and environmental consequences of decisions (Larigauderie and Mooney, 2010a). Ecosystem services are defined as the benefits that humans obtain from ecosystems (Seppelt et al., 2011). The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA, 2005) contributed substantially to pose the ecosystem services concept as a policy tool to achieve the sustainable use of natural resources bringing a broad research approach, where ecological, economic and institutional perspectives are integrated to produce insights into human impacts on ecosystems and the welfare effects of management policies. In December 2010, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was asked to convene a meeting to determine modalities and institutional arrangements of a new assessment body to track causes and consequences of anthropogenic ecosystem change (Perrings et al., 2011). This was an important step to the foundation of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) that works closely with UNESCO, FAO, UNDP and other relevant organizations (Larigauderie and Mooney, 2010b). The establishment of IPBES provides an important link with international policy, proposing a relationship between key scientific organizations, environmental policy bodies, and research funding organizations, which is a critical feature to address both scientific capacity and the policy relevance of research aiming to build capacity for and strengthen the use of science in policy making. As pointed out by Mooney et al. (2009), the capacity of ecosystems to deliver essential services to society is already under stress and it is urgent to track the changing status of ecosystems, deepen the understanding of the biological underpinnings for ecosystem service delivery and develop new tools and techniques for maintaining and restoring resilient biological and social systems. Additionally, solving problems posed by global change requires coordinated international research, and as much attention to social science as it does to natural science (Carpenter et al. 2009).