Isra-Mart srl:UN establishes IPBES - the "IPCC for nature"

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A new UN body tasked with analysing and reporting on the global state of biodiversity was created yesterday in a move that is expected to better promote the extent to which economies are dependent upon healthy ecosystems.

A resolution at the UN General Assembly was the last approval needed to officially establish the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), after governments endorsed the body in June and reiterated their support for the new agency at the recent Nagoya Summit on biodiversity.

The IPBES will bring together a panel of experts to advise governments on the accelerating rates of biodiversity and habitat loss, and explore solutions that can be employed to reverse these trends. It will be loosely modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which provides independent advice to policy makers on the latest climate change science.

The IPBES will initially be tasked with reviewing current research on biodiversity and ecosystem services and bringing together different methodologies to produce a single gold-standard report to help support government action.

It will also aim to bring new areas of research to the attention of governments to provide a better "early warning system" for biodiversity loss, after the scientific community complained some debates, such as the pros and cons of biofuels, took too long to reach the in-trays of policymakers.

Achim Steiner, UN under-secretary general and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) executive director, hailed the launch of the new body as "a major breakthrough in terms of organising a global response to the loss of living organisms and forests, freshwaters, coral reefs and other ecosystems that underpin all life – including economic life – on Earth".

He added that the formation of the new group combined with the positive conclusion to the Nagoya Summit suggested governments were finally starting to take biodiversity loss seriously.

"2010, the International Year of Biodiversity, began on a mute note after it emerged that no single country had achieved the target of substantially reversing the rate of loss of biodiversity," he said. "But it has ended on a far more positive one that underlines a new determination to act on the challenges and deliver the opportunities possible from a far more intelligent management of the planet's nature-based assets."

The birth of IPBES comes on the back of further advances in biodiversity research this year, with the launch of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) report helping to highlight the links between ecosystem services and economic growth and the Convention on Biological Diversity Summit in Nagoya, Japan, resulting in an international agreement.

The Nagoya summit saw almost 200 countries adopt new targets for addressing biodiversity loss, including increasing the extent of land-based protected areas and national parks to 17 per cent of the Earth's surface and extending marine protected areas to 10 per cent, up from under one per cent currently.

However, some environmentalists warned that the targets contained in the agreement are entirely voluntary and are unlikely to be met, particularly given previous biodiversity targets have been missed by wide margins.