News


Read complete article at: 
https://scienceblog.com/516354/the-environmental-crisis-is-far-more-urgent-today/

May 14, 2020 CNRS

According to Serge Morand, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the CNRS and CIRAD, researchers in ecology and the environmental sciences are more politically-minded than they were 20 or 30 years ago. Projects that combine scientific research with political action involving local communities are mushrooming around the world. ...

You also mention the recommendations of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)… 
S. M.: The IPBES is a network of experts on biodiversity, analogous to the IPCC for climate change, conceived by the UN in 2005 and officially founded in 2012. It was the IPBES that, for example, alerted us last year that there are now one million animal species at risk of imminent extinction. Until now, this network did not focus on health or epidemics, but that is changing. The IPBES was to launch an extensive study this year – now rescheduled for 2021, due to the context – on the impact of our agricultural and livestock policies. We should also consider the role of UNESCO, which provides its support and experience of ‘biosphere reserves’, that is, zones that have been considered useful for studying biodiversity and working towards more sustainable ecosystems. UNESCO is an ideal institution for concretely demonstrating the importance of biodiversity for health, as it promotes both scientific research and popular education. Generally speaking, this type of action comes in the wake of ‘One Health’, an initiative launched by the UN in the early 2000s but only truly active in the past decade. The idea is to create an alliance between entities such as the WHO, the FAO and the World Organisation for Animal Health in order to improve the response to ecological and epidemiological risks.  ...