JNCC at IPBES-11
By Sarah Scott and Hayley-Bo Dorrian-Bak
Two landmark reports published in December reveal huge opportunities and roles for across civil society, the public, and business whilst driving action for nature. While the detail in the reports were deliberated and agreed over the course of an intensive week of talks, our JNCC team have been contributing for months to these international negotiations in support of Defra and the UK Government. Find out more in our latest blog post.
JNCC’s Sarah Scott and Hayley-Bo Dorrian-Bak, along with colleagues at Defra, spent seven days at the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Plenary (IPBES-11) meeting held in December 2024 in Windhoek, Namibia. Agreeing to two new assessments made up the majority of the meeting agenda: the Thematic assessment of the interlinkages among biodiversity, water, food, and health (Nexus Assessment) and the Thematic assessment of the underlying causes of biodiversity loss and the determinants of transformative change and options for achieving the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity (Transformative Change Assessment).
Why bother with these long-winded negotiations?
IPBES, similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is an independent intergovernmental body established by governments to strengthen the science-policy interface for biodiversity and ecosystem services. In comparison to the other big international agreements (e.g. the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) or the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), both IPBES and IPCC are more focussed on the underlying science.
Whereas the CBD and UNFCCC produce lots of high-level commitments related to conserving nature and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, IPBES and IPCC provide recommendations to governments on the specific actions they can take to meet their ambitions set under CBD and UNFCCC. IPBES brings together hundreds of experts from across the globe to collate the best available evidence on a specific topic and then uses this to produce an IPBES assessment. With 147 governments as members, IPBES assessments have a huge global impact and are highly influential for international and national policy making.
There are two main outputs from the authors who contribute:
- a series of chapters making up one large assessment, and
- the summary for policymakers (SPM).
An important element to IPBES is that the SPMs are negotiated by IPBES Members line by line to form an agreed evidence-base. These summaries are usually close to 60 pages in length – you can only imagine how long agreeing each sentence (and word!) can take with 147 government positions to account for!
You may wonder, why bother with writing such a rigorous scientific assessment if it will be negotiated by the Members? How is this process still robust?
This is where IPBES and IPCC stand separately to other environmental agreements. Though Members do negotiate the SPM, which contains the key messages of the assessment, all suggested changes must also get approval from the lead authors of the assessment – changes must be supported by the underlying evidence-base. In addition, the content in the chapters is not negotiated by Members, so the underlying technical findings of the assessment largely remain unchanged.
Once the assessment SPMs have been negotiated in full, they must be formally accepted by all Members of the Platform. This happens during the IPBES Plenary, where all Members have a seat in the room and can object to accepting the SPM.
Image 1: The conference hall at IPBES 11 (image courtesy of Kiara Worth, ENB).
How was JNCC involved?
Before arriving in Namibia, JNCC supported the UK Government review of the Nexus Assessment and the Transformative Change Assessment. This process spanned across several years and review periods, where JNCC experts evaluated the different assessment chapters and SPM, and provided feedback on the content, evidence-base, and clarity for policy makers. These comments were then submitted to IPBES by the UK Government. Alongside this, we used our UK IPBES Stakeholder network to encourage relevant experts across the UK to register as independent reviewers, ensuring the evidence and findings were as robust as possible.
Alongside Defra, we then represented the UK Government at the negotiation of the final version of the SPM for both the Nexus Assessment and the Transformative Change Assessment at the IPBES Plenary in Namibia.
What next?
After a long week of negotiations, delegations head home and must begin the process of determining what they will do with the recommendations laid out in these assessments. The nexus assessment chapters alone cover over 1,000 pages! Whilst the IPBES experts did much of the heavy lifting in creating the assessment recommendations, now governments must start thinking of plans to implement the suggested actions.
Though these assessments are long, they have been used by policymakers. The first Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services has been used to inform a variety of policies, plans and actions. For example, it was used as scientific basis for the CBD’s Global Biodiversity Framework. It was cited in and informed the G7 Metz Charter on Biodiversity which committed to strengthening biodiversity strategies and policies in the Group of Seven (a forum to coordinate global policy) based on the findings of the report. Kenya cited the assessment as one of their reasons for joining the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People – an intergovernmental group of 120 countries to deliver a global agreement of protecting at least 30% of plant’s land and seas by 2030. At a UK level, the report Informed Scotland's new Biodiversity Strategy. The report also had a huge public impact – Extinction Rebellion and other activists cite the report as the reason they formed and a basis for their activities. And the report was also attributed to a boost in votes for the European Greens in the 2019 EU election
IPBES-12
Members of IPBES meet yearly to discuss a variety of other IPBES work and negotiate a new round of assessments. Excitingly, IPBES-12 will be hosted in the UK, in February 2026. The main item on the IPBES-12 agenda will be the Business and Biodiversity Assessment, a methodological assessment of the impact and dependency of business on biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people. JNCC has already contributed to the first round of reviews for this assessment, and we’ll be receiving the next draft of the SPM soon to review. In addition, we are now working with Defra on ways to mainstream biodiversity across government departments and implement some of the key recommendations in these assessments. Stay tuned to learn more about JNCC’s involvement at the next meeting!
Image 2: Hayley and Sarah at IPBES 11 (image courtesy of Hayley-Bo Dorrian-Bak, JNCC).