IPBES Meeting - 21 April

It is now pretty clear that the IPBES-meeting will not be able to finalize all that it was supposed to finalize. Too many issue take too long time. Fascinating to see how some find it extremely important to use "will" instead of "shall" and to make sure that the definitions of "Ecosystem Services" are in the "proper place" of the text. In my world view (probably wrong from the perspective of lawyers) almost none of the issues discussed will matter in the end.... However, there is still a chance that the governments will agree to formally establish IPBES tomorrow and able to go home and state that the meeting was a success. Being here I still am not really able to evaluate what "success" in this kind of process is.

Anyhow, it is a really interesting experience for a scientist to sometimes follow these kind of negotiations. The different cultural, regional and political perspectives on the world is evident and the dynamics of the discussions has a lot of fascinating aspects. This is human culture in action! In addition, there is a good number of good and interesting people to meet here and the connections made could prove valuable to SCB in the future.

Bege Jonsson