Davos, Switzerland – 26 June to 1 July 2022
The second World Biodiversity Forum (WBF) brought biodiversity researchers and stakeholders across all disciplines to Davos, Switzerland. Under the theme of “Inspiration for Action”, the WBF was packed with GEO BON members and saw motivating workshops, plenaries and presentations on all realms of biodiversity involving practitioners and actors with examples of solutions to inspire the transformational change required for conservation and sustainability.
The workshop “Towards a global biodiversity monitoring system”, convened by NASA, explored the necessity of a global biodiversity observation system (GBiOS) and identified the key priorities for its early development. The workshop described GBiOS and sought input from participants, including from IPBES, GEO BON, IUCN, and UNEP-WCMC, during breakout sessions. Discussions touched on the products and services GBiOS may provide to its users, constraints and challenges, and an exercise in prioritization. The co-conveners and contributors are expected to generate a synthesis report and white paper summarizing this event and next steps.
One of the key abilities of GBiOS will be to detect biodiversity change and attribute change to drivers of biodiversity loss and policy action. A session co-convened by GEO BON on “Detecting and attributing biodiversity change: linking essential variables to indicators and goals”, described this concept and demonstrated how essential biodiversity variables (EBVs) are being used to describe and detect changes in species populations, species, genetic diversity, and ecosystems. The standing-room only audience received this topic with enthusiasm, thoughtful questions and engaging panel discussion.
A workshop organized by EuropaBON on co-designing a European Biodiversity Observation Network had deep discussions on incentivizing the wider community to share and make biodiversity data available. This will be necessary in order to harmonize fragmented data collection and make effective policy decisions in Europe.
See the full program for descriptions of the work presented across our network, including by the Freshwater BON, and on topics related to open science principles for achieving the post-2020 outcomes, and implementing EBVs into the IPBES Nature Futures Framework scenarios.