Professor Kathy Willis attended the VII Plenary Meeting of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in Paris this week. IPBES is an intergovernmental body which assesses the global state of nature and the services it provides to society including for example, maintaining diversity of both wild crop relatives and locally domesticated plant and animal breeds (landraces) important for long-term resilience of agricultural production and food systems, to regulating water flow water (e.g. flood risk reduction) and equitable climates (e.g. carbon sequestration).
Kathy is a lead author on one of the chapters in the Global Assessment. This document will (hopefully) be ratified by governments this Saturday and released to the global media next Monday. She spent 3 days in the plenary meeting wordsmithing the draft text, line-by-line, with verbal input from government representatives from +100 countries – which was no mean feat!
