IEF and Biodiversity

The growing crisis in biodiversity has now reached the top of the international agenda alongside climate change, with the recent release of a damning report, the IPBES Global Assessment of Biodiversity. The International Environment Forum has decided to add Nature and Biodiversity as a new issue on which to concentrate, with materials in support of its membership accessible through a new Issue page on its web site. These include a summary of the Global Assessment on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 2019 providing the latest consensus scientific information from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) on the crisis facing nature and its biodiversity on which we all depend; a compilation of Baha'i writings and texts on Nature and Biodiversity to put this issue in a spiritual context; and a list of things that everyone can do to help to protect biodiversity. More materials will be added as they become available.

Some IEF members have been involved as scientists in this issue for many years, and have even contributed to the IBPES global assessment process. Sylvia Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen organized a workshop recently at Wageningen University in the Netherlands preparing inputs to IPBES on indicators of peoples' relationships to nature, with the participation of Arthur Dahl and other experts, including one of the lead authors of the IPBES report. Sylvia and Austin Bowden-Kerby of Fiji also contributed to an IPBES meeting in New Zealand last year.