Prof. Josef Settele of ALTER-Net partner UFZ has been selected by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) as a co-chair for its Global Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Assessment. Prof. Settele and the other two co-chairs (Professors Sandra Díaz and Eduardo Brondízio) are three of the world’s most eminent experts working on connections between nature and human well-being.

Covering a timeframe from the middle of the last century until the middle of this century, the assessment will analyze the state of knowledge about how people and nature interact, direct and indirect drivers of change, values, response options and nature’s benefits to people. It will explore the contributions of biodiversity and ecosystems to long-term quality of life – focusing on the synergies and trade-offs needed to balance the economic, social and environmental dimensions of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as well as progress made on the UN Strategic Plan for Biodiversity, including the Aichi Biodiversity Targets.

Josef Settele works at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, heading the animal ecology and social-ecological research section. He is a Professor of Ecology at Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg, and a member of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research – iDiv. He served as a coordinating lead author for both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the recent IPBES pollination assessment, and is one of the most prolific scientific authors in the field, with more than 370 scientific publications, including more than 30 books.

Sandra Díaz is a Professor of Community and Ecosystem Ecology at the National University of Córdoba and a senior member of the National Research Council of Argentina (CONICET) at Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal. Founder and director of the international initiative Núcleo DiverSus on Diversity and Sustainability, she has authored more than 150 scientific publications, many of them in prominent academic journals, and served in leading positions for the IPCC, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), Future Earth and DIVERSITAS.

Eduardo S. Brondízio is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, co-Editor-In-Chief of Current Opinion on Environmental Sustainability and serves on a range of international scientific bodies including the Science Committee of the Future Earth program. Committed for three decades to research on human-environment interaction in the Amazon, he is the author of more than 180 scientific publications and has contributed to numerous regional and global assessments including the MA.

Link to IPBES press release: http://www.ipbes.net/article/co-chairs-announced-landmark-global-biodiversity-ecosystems-assessment