Urgent need to move toward solution-orientated environmental assessments

Abstract

The trend of moving away from global environmental assessments and toward solution-oriented assessments raises new challenges because of the need to engage directly with politics, values, and deliberation. Here, we argue that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) have still not developed sufficient capacity to engage with these novel challenges and that the IPBES assessment of transformative change is an opportunity to put this right. The trend of moving away from global environmental assessments and toward solution-oriented assessments raises new challenges because of the need to engage directly with politics, values, and deliberation. Here, we argue that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) have still not developed sufficient capacity to engage with these novel challenges and that the IPBES assessment of transformative change is an opportunity to put this right.