Leading ecologists, biologists and social scientists will come together from Asia and the Pacific for the first author meeting of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in August in Japan.
QUT School of Law academic Dr Saiful Karim from QUT's International Law and Governance research program has been selected as a lead author for the IPBES Regional Assessment report for Asia and the Pacific, which the team of experts will deliver in 2018 on the state of biodiversity.
Dr Karim said the overall scope of the regional assessments was to report on the status and trends of biodiversity and ecosystems, the impact of their changes on quality of life and the effectiveness of responses.
"The aim of the report is to present facts on the state of biodiversity in our region so that governments have the foundation to frame future policies for biodiversity conservation," Dr Karim said.
"A multidisciplinary panel has selected the leading experts who will meet in Tokyo in August to assess the state of biodiversity in land, freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems."
Dr Karim will be a lead author of the assessment report's chapter on "options for governance, institutional arrangements and private and public decision making across scales and sectors".
"Our region hosts some of the most important mega-biodiversity countries in the world.
"Thirteen out of the 34 biodiversity hotspots of the world designated by Conservation International are in this region which also has the world's highest number of threatened species."
Dr Karim said there were many reasons biodiversity hotspots didn't have enough protection.
"Conservation of biodiversity is often perceived as conflicting with national development aims but it is essential for sustainable development and if it is done properly, it doesn't hamper development."
Dr Karim said the IPBES assessment would be policy relevant but not policy prescriptive.
"We will state the facts, what the situation is now," he said.
IPBES is a sister body to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In April 2012, the world's governments established IPBES, after a UN General Assembly resolution requesting the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to convene a plenary meeting to fully operationalise the platform, as the leading intergovernmental body for assessing the state of the planet's biodiversity, its ecosystems and the essential services they provide to society.
Media contact: Niki Widdowson, QUT media, 07 3138 2999 or n.widdowson@qut.edu.au
