Biodiversity is critically linked to human well-being and life, given that it underpins and is the foundation of ecosystems from which human societies derive essential products for living. These ecosystem ‘goods and services’ typically include essentials such as oxygen, water, food, medicines, flood regulation, coastal protection, nutrient cycling and many others. However, the unprecedented loss of biodiversity (i.e. species extinction, loss of genetic variation, etc.) is up to 1,000 times more than the ‘background’ or natural rate.

These declines, due to habitat destruction, climate change, pollution, the spread of invasive species and a host of other threats, reveal that the natural world cannot support the pressure that humanity is placing on it. 

Because of the close inter-linkages that occur across biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being, there has been great determination among the scientific and policy communities to establish a mechanism, similar in function to that of IPCC, for biodiversity and ecosystem services. To that end, a new science-based platform has recently been established to address these catastrophic losses of biodiversity.

The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), an IPCC-like science-policy platform seeks to provide a “peer review” of current scientific data that informs decision makers of the ecological condition of our earth system, thus aiming to provide governments with ‘gold standard’ reports for the decisive action that is required to address declines in biodiversity and ecosystems services worldwide. Given that IPBES will take a multi-disciplinary approach that will include a strong and equal contribution from the social sciences from the very beginning, IHDP stands well positioned to contribute its expertise on the human dimensions of global environmental change, given that it is mostly the actions of humankind that have led to the need for this Platform.