IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature

IPBES was established in April 2012 and is expected to deliver its first outputs by the end of 2013. These will include a critical review of all existing assessments related to biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES), and an overarching set of concepts and definitions to guide its future work. The first thematic assessments on particular BES issues will be delivered in 2014 and BES assessments at a sub-global scale will be delivered in 2015.

IPBES will therefore provide welcome means of generating, catalyzing and coordinating reliable BES information and knowledge for business and other stakeholders.

The benefits which business can expect from IPBES arise from the activities and outputs of the Platform, some of which are likely to be relevant for BES-related risk management. These include:

• the development of new BES assessment methodologies and tools, providing reliable international standards for BES knowledge;
• the generation of publically accessible BES assessment reports at different levels (global to regional work undertaken by the Platform and national/sub-national work catalyzed by the Platform);
• efforts to make assessment methodologies more consistent and bolster the effectiveness of modelling techniques and scenario-based techniques;
• the Platform’s clearing-house function for BES assessment results and methodologies, with a view to making them simple, clear and accessible to a wide range of stakeholders;
• initiatives for increasing access to BES information;
• capacity-building activities targeting policy-makers in developed countries, to support an enabling environment for BES-related science-policy links.

In general, businesses will continue to rely heavily on the availability of pre-existing BES data, as they are unlikely to have the capacity to generate their own BES data sets.

IUCN has seen considerable business interest in global BES tools and data sets (such as the Integrated Biodiversity Assessment Tool and the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™) and even greater interest and demand from business for more local-level data and standardized methodologies for use at a site level.