Professor Charles Godfray, immediate past President of the BES, is to give evidence to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee on Wednesday 14th December as part of the Committee’s inquiry into ‘Greening the Common Agricultural Policy‘.

Professor Godfray will give evidence at 16.00 and the session will be available to watch live on Parliament TV.

Oliver Pescott, current BES Fellow at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, has published a POSTnote on ‘Natural Flood Management’. This will be available shortly on the BES website.

Flood risk management today uses a range of approaches to reduce risk, including structural works, such as hard flood defences, and non-structural approaches, such as improving flood warning systems and land-use planning. The restoration, alteration and use of natural landscape features are also receiving attention as potentially cost-effective ways of reducing flood risk that can provide other environmental benefits, such as water quality improvements or carbon storage.

The POSTnote will be launched formally in Parliament on Tuesday 17th January, from 4 – 6pm. The event will be chaired by Anne Macintosh MP, Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Flood Protection and Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee. Presentations from a number of speakers will discuss key issues in Natural Flood Management:

– Martin Whiting, Chartered Institute of Water and Environmental Management, Rivers & Coastal Group Chair
- Dr Neil McIntyre, Reader in Surface Water Hydrology, Imperial College London
- Dr Paul Quinn, Senior Lecturer in Catchment Hydrology, Newcastle University
- Dr Wendy Kenyon, Senior Researcher, James Hutton Institute (Land and Natural Resource Use Research)

To register your interest in attending, please email postevents@parliament.uk or call 020 7219 8377.

The launch of the next POSTNote authored by a BES POST Fellow will take place on Tuesday 17th January. The topic of the POSTNote is ‘Natural Flood Management’. The launch will be held at the Houses of Parliament, Westminster, from 16.00 – 18.00. Further details about how to register for a place will be available shortly and will be posted on the blog.

Our current BES Fellow at POST (the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology) is PhD student Oliver Pescott. The Fellowship scheme is open to all second and third year PhD students of ecology based at a UK university. The next round of applications, for a Fellowship to begin in the autumn of 2012, will open in the New Year. If you are interested in applying, please visit the BES website to find out more about this fantastic opportunity.

The report of the joint British Ecologcial Society – UK Biodiversity Research Advisory Group (BRAG) meeting on the future of the UK National Ecosystem Assessment and Intergovernmental Science – Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is now available. The session was held as part of the BES Annual Meeting at the University of Sheffield, on 13th September.

We’re now recruiting an intern, to join us for three months from January 2012, working for two days each week with the BES Policy Manager. We will cover travel expenses within London and lunch costs of up to £5 per day.

You will be involved in all aspects of our policy work, including drafting responses to consultations, helping to organise meetings and attending events to represent the Society and our members to external contacts.

The closing date is Friday 18th November, at 17.00.

Interviews will be held on the morning of Monday 5th December.

Full details of how to apply are available here.

The latest BES Policy Digest is now available, outlining policy developments across the four UK Governments, parliament, the Research Councils and Europe since we published the last e-newsletter in July.

Today is the first day of a plenary meeting to discuss and decide upon the formation of the Integovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), convened by the UN Environment Programme. Representatives from the United Nations, and observers from NGOs and other bodies, have assembled in Nairobi, Kenya, to consider how IPBES will operate and, amongst other decisions, determine where the IPBES secretariat will be located.

On the eve of the meeting, Prof. Bob Watson, Defra’s Chief Scientific Adviser, gave an interview to the Independent newspaper, in which he outlined his hopes for IPBES. Prof. Watson suggested that the only way in which IPBES can function effectively will be if developing nations have ownership over any in-country ecosystem assessments which are conducted, and if these are conducted by scientists from that nation – similar to the UK National Ecosystem Assessment. “If they think that this is just the white world, the developed world, telling them what to do, that’ll be the end of it.”

The BES, together with the UK Biodiversity Research Advisory Group (UK BRAG) organised a session at the BES Annual Meeting in Sheffield last month which introduced the IPBES to the assembled ecologists. Dr Andrew Stott, Defra’s representative to IPBES from the civil service, outlined the role of IPBES, as agreed at a meeting in Busan, South Korea, in 2010. A copy of Dr Stott’s presentation is available from the BES website.

As outlined by Dr Stott, IPBES will:

- Generate new knowledge: identifying information needed for policy; catalysing research and surveying
- Conduct regular and timely assessments: at global, regional and sub-regional scales; and on thematic and ‘new topics identified by science’.
- Provide support for policy formulation, through promoting access to policy-relevant tools and methods;
- Have a capacity building function: identifying needs; supporting the highest priority needs; catalysing funding.

IPBES is intended as an ‘IPCC for biodiversity’; a credible, scientifically independent body which is policy relevant but not policy prescriptive (similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

At the plenary meeting over the next few days decisions will be made about how the IPBES is structured; whether, for example, a scientific advisory group is formed which can advise the Plenary – the IPBES decision-making body- on scientific and technical aspects of the work programme and which can approve specific scientific procedures related to how ecosystem assessments are conducted. A further meeting in Nairobi, in March/ April 2012, will see delegates decide on further aspects of how the IPBES will work, including its work programme.

As IPBES develops, there are likely to be opportunities for ecologists and others to get involved with the conduct of assessments and with capacity building, although questions remain about how to incentivise scientists to take part in these activities (for example, through university reward structures such as the Research Excellence Framework). Ecologists and others in the UK who would like to find out more about IPBES and who would like to remain fully engaged with the development of the Platform, can join the UK Stakeholder Group, maintained by the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC).

The report of the joint Natural England – BES meeting on ‘Adapting Conservation to a Changing Climate‘ has been published. This meeting took place over two days in January 2011 and saw over 120 policy-makers, ecologists and conservation practitioners attend Charles Darwin House for lively discussion and networking.

Climate change is widely regarded as the major long-term threat to biodiversity and ecosystem services and it is essential that conservation adapts to deal with this threat. General principles have been identified and adaptation is starting to happen, but we need to step up the pace.

Effective adaptation requires a strong partnership between researchers, practitioners and policy makers. It is essential that adaptation measures are developed on the basis of sound science, combined with a rigorous assessment of their feasibility and acceptability to society.

The key messages to emerge from presentation and discussion at the conference are:

1) Climate change adaptation needs to start happening to a far greater extent than currently. It was not difficult to find research into possible adaptation strategies, assessments of vulnerability and plans for implementing adaptation. There are many fewer examples of adaptation that is actually happening.

2) Pilot studies need to be established to help address the uncertainties around determining the most effective adaptation measures, for example on the relative importance of increasing connectivity of habitat networks, compared to improving or enlarging existing sites. Good monitoring and assessment of the outcomes are essential.

3) The issues posed by climate change are different depending on the extent to which climate actually changes. To put it crudely, there is a big distinction between dealing with 2°C and 4 °C of warming. At the lower end of the scale, there is plenty of scope to increase the resilience of the landscapes and ecosystems that we currently have. At the higher end, this will not be sufficient and we need to consider much more
radical approaches and be prepared to accept species in very different places and place that look very different.

4) Climate change adaptation needs to be developed as part of a wider transformation in the approach of human societies to the natural environment, in which we understand it better and value it more.

Full details of this meeting, together with copies of speakers’ presentations, are available from the BES website.

The BES is refreshing its policy priorities. What do you think we should be focusing on?

From food security, to multiple demands on land, to balancing the trade-offs between ecosystem services, 2020 will bring great challenges for the UK and internationally. Ecological science can inform the response to these challenges. Where should the BES be focusing our efforts to ensure that our members’ science is fed into the policy debates to shape our future?

Leave your comment here on the blog, ontribute your views through Twitter (#BES2020), or email the Policy Team.

Professor Jules Pretty gave a fascinating and wide-ranging insight into the sustainable intensification of agriculture on Tuesday afternoon at the BES Annual Meeting; this year’s BES Lecture. Prof. Pretty suggested that there was an ‘emerging consensus’ around the necessity of improving agricultural productivity whilst minimising harm to the environment – as testified by recent reports from the Foresight Global Food and Farming Futures programme, the Royal Society and others.

By 2050, the Foresight report has concluded, a 50-100% increase in food production will be needed worldwide to feed a growing human population. The precise figure will depend on how fast and far the population grows and on the consumption patterns which emerge. Food choices are currently converging. Where these were previously divergent, driven by choices and norms informed by differences in culture, now a Western ideal of consumption dominates, informing a greater consumption of meat in China, for example. Food price spikes in recent years have also adversely and disproportionately affected the poor and the hungry. Such trends will only continue unless radical reform is made to the systems by which we currently produce food, which involve intensive application of fertilisers, an increased use of machinery and a huge growth in livestock for meat and dairy which themselves eat grain which could be used to feed the hungry.

Read the full report at the BES Annual Meeting blog.