The next Nobel Peace Prize?

The extraordinary choice of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as joint recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize crowned a year in which global warming has reached new heights on the international agenda. More than that, it gave dramatic recognition to the unparalleled influence exerted on decision-makers and the general public by a body of natural and social scientists.

Just as the IPCC basks in the accolade, another community of scientists is collectively wondering whether its time has come, and how best to follow climate change experts into the mainstream of policymaking. In November, an international committee of scientists, governments and UN bodies will decide whether to propose a new mechanism bringing together and disseminating current knowledge about biodiversity.

The meeting in Montpellier, France, is the culmination of a two-year exercise struggling with the cumbersome title, the Consultative Process towards an International Mechanism of Scientific Expertise on Biodiversity (IMoSEB). Launched by the former French president Jacques Chirac at a conference in Paris in January 2005, it has tried to address a puzzling question: given that the consequences of the continued loss of the variety of life on earth are every bit as significant to human societies as the changing climate, why has the issue so far failed to achieve anything like the same priority in the decisions made at local, national or international scales?

One answer to this question seems to be a matter of definition. The co-chair of the consultation process, Ghanaian botanist Alfred Oteng-Yeboah, comments: “Biodiversity has been a common expression which almost everybody appears to know, but not everybody really understands what it is. As a result, dealing with it has been a difficult issue because it does not measure up at any level in priority in terms of government understanding, government decision-making or in individual people’s decisions.”

A similar view is put forward by Prof Kerry Turner of the ESRC Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE), based at the University of East Anglia. “The term biodiversity has been defined scientifically in a number of ways, and therefore it has failed to resonate with the wider public,” says Prof Turner.

A widely-held misconception is that biodiversity is simply the number of different species on the planet, or a fancy name for wildlife. The Convention on Biological Diversity defines it as follows: “… the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems.”

By this definition, biodiversity is the variety of life at all levels, from the genetic variation within a crop species to the complex interactions of thousands of species with each other and the physical environment, in the webs of life we call ecosystems.

Even after biodiversity is more clearly defined, a further communication barrier remains: explaining why it really matters. Losing species or landscapes may provoke emotional reactions, especially if they are aesthetically attractive, but these can rarely compete for political influence when set against hard-headed economic arguments for the development which threatens them.

Another researcher at CSERGE, Dr Brendan Fisher, puts it like this: “One key reason why climate change is high on the policy priority is that it is generally easy for people to make the connection between their immediate well-being and climate. It is a bit more difficult for people to make the connection between their welfare and biodiversity, especially in OECD countries.”

For the majority of the human population that now lives in urban areas, biodiversity can seem remote from everyday life: something to be appreciated at the weekend or on holiday if you are lucky, but hardly a day-to-day preoccupation. Yet current research approaches link biodiversity to just about every aspect of human social and economic activity, through the concept of ecosystem services.

By this type of analysis, the biological processes of ecosystems are linked to the various components of human well-being such as nutrition, health, security and income. Viewed this way, “services” include the provision of food (crops, meat and wild foods such as fish and game) and fresh water, pollination of crops, filtering of contaminants in air and water, and protection from disasters. In other words, things that matter to us all, every day of the week.

There has already been an attempt to define and assess these ecosystem services at a global scale. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) brought together more than 1300 scientists and other experts to investigate the link between ecosystems and human well-being. Its report in 2005 concluded that following the unprecedented changes made to landscapes, river basins and ocean food chains in the past fifty years, the capacity of ecosystems to continue to sustain human societies had been severely compromised.

Despite the sobering message that emerged from the MA, it is widely acknowledged that its impact on decision-makers has been very limited. In part, this is because it was a “one-off” exercise – once the huge tomes of the assessment were published, the network of experts who produced it disbanded, in contrast to the IPCC which has produced regular reports over the past fifteen years and feeds directly into international decision-making through the UN Climate Change Convention that produced the Kyoto Protocol.

So the current consultation on a biodiversity science mechanism is looking at ways in which the vast quantity of research carried out into the functioning of ecosystems could be put much more effectively and consistently before governments, businesses and the public in a form which would enable them to appreciate the full consequences of their decisions.

As part of the consultation, a number of case studies were commissioned to identify some of the gaps in the current use of biodiversity science. One of the more striking examples was an analysis of the recent worldwide concern about the emergence of the H5N1 avian flu virus.

The study notes that among the key factors driving the emergence and spread of such diseases are environmental changes that affect the behaviour and population dynamics of wild species, and demographic changes that affect the contact between people, livestock and wild birds. However, of 792 papers written on H5N1 since 1998, only 2% have come from biodiversity scientists, and their expertise has had little influence on the agencies dealing with the looming threat of a global pandemic.

The case study on avian flu concludes that a new international mechanism pulling together expertise on biodiversity could help to produce better policies for dealing with the threat of emerging diseases. A series of regional consultations has also heard from biodiversity experts around the world frustrated that their knowledge is consistently ignored.

Alfred Oteng-Yeboah notes, “The IPCC has managed to become a mouthpiece for climate change. Whenever any of their working groups brings out a report, the whole world is listening attentively to it. We think that if biodiversity gets that kind of mouthpiece, it will help to raise the low level of priority that we have placed on biodiversity at the moment.”

While there may be a broad consensus that the priority given to biodiversity is too low, views are much more divided as to what kind of new international body - if any - will improve the situation. An important contrast is made here with climate change: whereas the IPCC is dealing with a single problem which affects the whole planet, an equivalent mechanism for biodiversity would need somehow to integrate research into a vast range of different issues from the most local, such as pollution of a lake, to global questions such as the decline of migrating fish species.

There is also debate as to whether the mechanism should be a strictly independent body run by scientists without political interference, or whether it should be controlled by governments. A major criticism of the Convention on Biological Diversity, the principal international body currently dealing with the issue, is that it has become over-politicised and bogged down in issues affecting national sovereignty such as access to genetic resources.

Brendan Fisher of CSERGE warns against assuming that better science necessarily produces better policy: “One problem with science as a silo is the idea that all you need to provide is the information. It is not just access to information that leads to policy making but also how that information is delivered and in what form.

“I think the recent announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize going to both IPCC and Al Gore speaks to this point,” says Dr Fisher.

As the consultation reaches its end, the drift appears to be towards a combination of a “network of networks”, co-ordinating scientific knowledge on biodiversity from around the world and responding flexibly to emerging issues, with an inter-governmental controlling body to ensure political buy-in to its conclusions and advice – thus avoiding the short-lived impact of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

Whatever conclusions are reached by next month’s meeting - and there is no guarantee it will propose anything at all – a new “IPCC for biodiversity” could struggle to get off the ground. It will face scepticism from many within existing institutions who feel it will duplicate their work, and who see it as a whim from a French president no longer in office.

Supporters of the idea, however, believe it could provide an essential catalyst to raise the profile of biodiversity in decision-making at every level, and to stem the slide towards degradation of the life-support systems of the planet.

This article was first published on the website of the Economic and Social Research Council (www.esrc.ac.uk)