By means of the “Lego Serious Play” methodology, we are going to gather about 80 people of all ages to talk and work together. It will be a fun and transformational process, based on investigations that have showed that by playing games we can learn and understand our environment better, including its characteristics and potentials.
During the past decades, managed honeybee stocks have increased globally. Managed honeybees are particularly used within mass-flowering crops and often spill over to adjacent natural habitats after crop blooming. Here, we uniquely show the simultaneous impact that honeybee spillover has on wild plant and animal communities in flower-rich woodlands via changes in plant–pollinator network structure that translate into a direct negative effect on the reproductive success of a dominant wild plant.
Vang Rasmussen L., Coolsaet B., Martin A., Mertz O., Pascual U., Corbera E., Dawson N., Fisher J.A., Franks P., Ryan C.M. Social-ecological outcomes of agricultural intensification. Nature sustainability. 1, 275–282. DOI (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0070-8) Abstract Land-use intensification in agrarian landscapes is seen as a key strategy to simultaneously feed humanity and use ecosystems sustainably, but the conditions that […]
S. Wunder, R. Brouwer, S. Engel, D. Ezzine-de-Blas, R. Muradian, U. Pascual & R. Pinto. From principles to practice in paying for nature’s services. 2018 Nature sustainability. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0036-x Abstract Payments for Environmental Services (PES) constitute an innovative economic intervention to counteract the global loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functions. In theory, some appealing features should […]
A major challenge today and into the future is to maintain or enhance beneficial contributions of nature to a good quality of life for all people. This is among the key motivations of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a joint global effort by governments, academia, and civil society to assess and promote knowledge of Earth’s biodiversity and ecosystems and their contribution to human societies in order to inform policy formulation.
Ecosystem recovery from anthropogenic disturbances, either without human intervention or assisted by ecological restoration, is increasingly occurring worldwide. As ecosystems progress through recovery, it is important to estimate any resulting deficit in biodiversity and functions. Here we use data from 3,035 sampling plots worldwide, to quantify the interim reduction of biodiversity and functions occurring during the recovery process (that is, the ‘recovery debt’). Compared with reference levels, recovering ecosystems run annual deficits of 46–51% for organism abundance, 27–33% for species diversity, 32–42% for carbon cycling and 31–41% for nitrogen cycling.
Payments for Environmental Services (PES) constitute an innovative economic intervention to counteract the global loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functions. In theory, some appealing features should enable PES to perform well in achieving conservation and welfare goals. In practice, outcomes depend on the interplay between context, design and implementation. Inspecting a new global dataset, we find that some PES design principles pre-identified in the social-science literature as desirable, such as spatial targeting and payment differentiation, are only partially being applied in practice.
Achieving the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement requires forest-based mitigation. Collective progress towards this goal will be assessed by the Paris Agreement’s Global stocktake. At present, there is a discrepancy of about 4 GtCO2 yr−1 in global anthropogenic net land-use emissions between global models (reflected in IPCC assessment reports) and aggregated national GHG inventories (under the UNFCCC). We show that a substantial part of this discrepancy (about 3.2 GtCO2 yr−1) can be explained by conceptual differences in anthropogenic forest sink estimation, related to the representation of environmental change impacts and the areas considered as managed.
This credential brings 2 million euro to the Basque Centre for Climate Change, which celebrates its 10th anniversary of dedication to international research on climate change this year.
BC3 is among the 7 organisations distinguished as María de Maeztu units of excellence.
Along with BC3, the selection this year features the Astrobiology Centre, the Institute of Neurosciences of the University of Barcelona, CIC Biomagune and some others.
Sérgio H. Faria, Ikerbasque Professor at the Basque Centre for Climate Change, BC3, was selected by the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, to contribute to the Sixth Evaluation Report.