COP16 Dispatch: Week 1 Science Policy Forum from ESA

By Astrid Caldas, Jeannine Cavender, and Stephanie Hampton.

Over twenty ESA members are attending COP16 in Cali, Colombia as delegates badged by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity

From left to right: Astrid Caldas, Kofi Akamani, Jeannine Cavender, Leisa Perch, Stephanie Hampton, and James Reed at the COP16 panel on October 26, 2024.

Secretariat with official observer status. ESA Delegates Astrid Caldas, Jeannine Cavender-Bares, and Stephanie Hampton participated in the Science Policy Forum in the Blue Zone on Saturday, Oct. 26 in the session on integrated management of forests and natural resources.

The session was convened by the National Academy of Sciences and Engineering’s U.S. National Committee for the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS) which represents the United States in national and international activities related to the biological and life sciences. Kofi Akamani at Southern Illinois University organized a session that was geared at conveying how ecosystems can be managed inclusively to foster ecosystem integrity and meet human needs in appropriate cultural contexts that enable adaptive management strategies and policy.

Astrid Caldas spoke about the interconnectedness of climate change and biodiversity that is threatened directly by climate change, but species conservation can help maintain carbon out of the atmosphere. She highlighted the importance of an ecosystem approach to biodiversity conservation, which focuses on maintaining ecosystem functions that are essential for forest conservation. In addition, the integration of Indigenous and community knowledge is essential for management and conservation of forest systems at a local level, so that sustainable uses are part of the equation. For successful management, it is essential to make the right connections across science, society, ecosystem services and conservation, including the issue of protection of rights, and from the science point of view, producing (and co-producing) actionable science for those who need it is essential for that process.

From left to right: Astrid Caldas, Kofi Akamani, Jeannine Cavender, Leisa Perch, Stephanie Hampton, and James Reed at the COP16 panel on October 26, 2024.

Jeannine Cavender-Bares (from the Governing Board of ESA and Director of the Harvard University Herbaria) discussed the major technological advances in the biological sciences that have enabled us to decipher organismal genomics, construct the tree of life and monitor many dimensions of biodiversity remotely from space and aircraft. She emphasized the need to couple new kinds of biodiversity observations with hundreds of years of accumulated knowledge of our living planet from preserved collections to monitor Earth’s biodiversity in its many forms and how it is changing. She emphasized the tree of life as a natural organizing framework for conservation, the need to save branches of the tree of life and to incorporate phylogenetic approaches into the Global Biodiversity Framework (link to ESA Frontiers publication on ‘no branch left behind’ (https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/fee.2696). In her closing remarks she explained how integrating multiple kinds of observations and knowledge is critical to informed decision-making and to adaptive management.

ESA President Stephanie Hampton explored the challenges and benefits of integrated management that simultaneously includes the freshwater and terrestrial components of ecosystems. She discussed the challenges of scales where watersheds and managed forest boundaries may not match complicating management plans and monitoring. But the inextricable linkages of healthy forests and water make such challenges well worth addressing. Upstream forests purify water downstream, and terrestrial and aquatic organisms are connected through food webs and biogeochemical cycles. She emphasized the need to monitor biodiversity and ecosystems before and after management actions, across freshwater and terrestrial environments, and highlighted innovations in technology that lower barriers for monitoring.

6th Science-Policy Forum for Biodiversity and 9th International Conference on Sustainability Science Program.

Disclaimer: Opinions are solely those of the guest contributor and not an official ESA policy or position.