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Tracking progress towards a better world – the role of the Biodiversity Indicators Partnership

Last week, from 25-27 January, UNEP-WCMC hosted this year’s meeting of the Biodiversity Indicators Partnership. Hilary Allison, Head of UNEP-WCMC’s Ecosystem Assessment Programme reflects on the meeting and the importance of developing indicators that can be used to report on multiple global conventions.

I’ve just spent three fascinating and inspiring days with a group of global experts on biodiversity indicators whose unsung work deserves wider recognition. Let me explain why.

Do you remember that back in 2010 the world set itself some ambitious goals to redress the long term declines in biodiversity? These goals form the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity, described by some as the greatest conservation plan the world has ever produced and the goals are supported by 20 targets, known as the Aichi Biodiversity Targets.

The Plan was a formal recognition that not only is biodiversity loss in its own right a global problem, but also that it underpins many critical ecosystem services, food security, human livelihoods and well-being and therefore is a cornerstone of sustainable economies and sustainable development.

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) takes regular stock of progress towards these goals and their associated targets and this week, the global partnership of organizations which produce the indicators that underpin the Plan’s targets, met in Cambridge to plan their work for the months and years ahead. UNEP-WCMC was privileged to play host to this meeting in its convening role as the Secretariat for the Biodiversity Indicators Partnership.

Experts from around the world gathered to hear a roundup of progress on work to fill some of the outstanding global gaps in indicators for the Plan, to hear about other complementary processes which need biodiversity indicators and help reshape the partnership to meet future challenges and opportunities. There was great energy in the room, as the partners enjoyed a rare opportunity to meet each other in person.

The Partnership was originally convened to support the indicators for the Strategic Plan and its Aichi Biodiversity Targets but we are now in an era of ever increasing demands for environmental reporting and assessment which have biodiversity based indicator requirements. Such demands illustrate that biodiversity is being increasingly recognized as a key component of global environmental reporting which is a welcome development.

A recurring theme of the meeting was that the Partnership should be promoting its indicators in response to the multiplicity of  relevant global processes which need global indicators including the upcoming assessments being prepared by Inter-Governmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the newly adopted Sustainable Development Goals, UNEP’s Global Environmental Outlook and also the emerging System of Environmental Economic Accounting being adopted by many countries.

The multiplicity of demands for information from these agreements and processes can be a challenge for Partners to track, and there are many analyses of which biodiversity indicators have been selected to report against the many international (multi-lateral) environmental agreements (MEAs as they are sometimes known) and existing reporting processes mentioned above. Harmonizing of indicators (in simple terms, the process of collecting and analysing data once but using it to report many times) has long been a call of the international community of biodiversity indicator providers and will help to reduce complexity amongst those bodies and institutions who only come into contact with these processes intermittently. The Partnership has a key role to play in helping to keep track of which indicators are supporting which processes and in ensuring high quality indicators are available for adoption.

Of course, good indicators depend on high quality data and analyses, and the Partnership heard from its sister network GEO-BON, the Biodiversity Observation Network of the Group on Earth Observations, about how we collaboratively fuse such data into useful indicators.

The Partnership is keen to be inclusive and to accept indicator producers who fulfil or could fulfil the changing suite of indicators selected to report on the CBD and indeed on other MEAs, so it also spent some time considering its scope and future membership.

I was truly impressed by the generosity of the Partnership members in providing their time, energy knowledge, expertise and creativity so unstintingly to ensure that through the indicators it produces we have as clear a picture as possible of the state of progress towards some very ambitious goals; such assessments will shape our future course of collective action to conserve biodiversity.

Participants at the 2016 BIP meeting

Participants of the 2016 meeting of the Biodiversity Indicators Partnership

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