Victoria Reyes-García speaks on the IPBES Biodiversity Report in Madrid

14/06/2019

Victoria Reyes-García is one of the four scientists from Spain who participated in the drafting of this report, which alerts on the biodiversity crisis with a million species in danger of extinction and how it can endanger the human species in a matter of decades.

The event was presided by Minister for the Ecological Transition Teresa Ribera and took place at the headquarters of the Abertis Foundation. The objective was to present and discuss the latest results of the report drafted by this independent organism and commissioned by the UN, as well as discuss the actions which could be put into practice to protect nature and guarantee the health and further development of humanity.

The report, presented in May at the UN headquarters in Paris, represents the most complete scientific assessment of the state of biodiversity ever to be produced. A total of 145 experts and 310 collaborators from 50 countries worked on the report. It is based on 15,000 scientific documents, as well as other sources of knowledge such as local and indigenous wisdom. The document includes the assessment of changes occurring in the past five decades and provides a full panorama of the relationship between economic development paths and their impact on nature. It also displays a range of possible scenarios for the following decades.

The report shows that the speed at which ecosystems are deteriorating has no precedents in the history of humanity and the extinction of species advances at an accelerated pace as a result of non-regulated human activities; but it also points out the tendencies which can be halted. For this there is a need for a "transforming change" in each of the aspects in which human interact with nature.

Victoria Reyes-García was invited by the Ministry for the Ecological Transition to participate in the debate "Global Assessment on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services: main contents and solutions", which also included the participation of Unai Pascual from the Basque Climate Change Centre (BC3) and also one of the authors of the report, as well as Fernando Santos from the King Juan Carlos University.