Professor Qin Tianbao Selected as IPBES Expert for Scoping Global Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) recently employed Professor Qin Tianbao as the assessment expert on the outline of Scoping report for a global assessment on biodiversity and ecosystem services, and the first author of Report on the Regional Scoping process for a set of Regional and Sub-regional Assessment of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services for the Asia-Pacific.

As an independent authoritative intergovernmental body, IPBES is committed to closer contacts between the academia of biodiversity and ecosystem services and policy-makers. It also aims to apply scientific knowledge into government policy-making, so as to better protect global biodiversity and upgrade ecosystem services. It has a membership of 124 countries, China included.

The authors of assessment experts for IPBES report would be finalized after nomination by member states among eminent professionals in natural science and social sciences and after strict selection by multidisciplinary expert panels. Review panel, mainly composed of natural scientists and a few law experts, marks the state-of-the-art professionalism in biodiversity and ecosystem services. They should offer solutions to challenges of this sort and give expression to national interests of their own countries. 

The objective of this task is to assess global and regional biodiversity and ecosystem services and the influence of their change on mankind’s wellbeing and response mechanism. The assessment will be submitted as scientific researches on IPBES plenary session in February 2016 for policy decisions. The work undertaken by Professor Qin Tianbao is to compose draft report for the regional assessment of biodiversity and ecosystem services in the Asia-Pacific as the first author and review the global assessment report.

Professor Qin Tianbao, director of the Research Institute of Environmental Law (RIEL) of Wuhan University , has been engaged in researches on laws and policies of biodiversity. He has hosted numerous scientific projects in this field and published a series of monographs and many academic papers on some high-level periodicals at home and abroad. And he once attended the Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity as a member of Chinese delegation.