For the third time, the rectors of Danish universities and the Director-General of the Ministry of the Environment have signed an agreement to continue Denmark’s participation in IPBES for another three-year period.
The biodiversity crisis has moved up the agenda and is no longer unknown to the Danish public. This is due, in part, to Denmark’s participation in IPBES and the efforts of other organizations.
The collaboration now consists of six universities and the Ministry of the Environment. Aalborg University and Copenhagen Business School have now joined the collaboration. A total of four departments from the University of Copenhagen, two from Aarhus University, and three from the University of Southern Denmark are participating in the collaboration alongside DTU Aqua and the new members of the “IPBES family.”
A Look Back at Activities
Looking back on the partnership’s activities, there is much to highlight. The latest highlight of the past period was participation in the Danish delegation to the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Kunming-Montreal COP15 meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity, where the so-called Global Biodiversity Framework was adopted, featuring four overarching global goals and 23 specific biodiversity targets to be achieved by 2030.
Anders Barfod, an associate professor at Aarhus University and a member of the IPBES steering committee, attended COP15 and says:
It was a historic meeting in Montreal, and the hope now is that, with some more clearly defined indicators and progress assessments along the way, we will be better able to actually achieve the agreed-upon goals. Things have gone very poorly over the past two decades—first with the 2010 biodiversity target and then with the 20 Aichi Targets. It’s also no secret that the challenge is enormous.
Implementation will largely have to take place at the national level and, in Denmark’s case, both through EU cooperation and in collaboration with the 98 Danish municipalities. The municipalities, in particular, were well represented if we look back a month further in the IPBES collaboration’s calendar of events.
In November 2022, a symposium at the Moesgaard Museum at Aarhus University provided a forum for discussing opportunities for biodiversity in open landscapes, and prior to that, in early September 2022, the IPBES office organized a debate on low-lying areas during the Climate Citizens’ Meeting in Middelfart.
Professor Carsten Rahbek, chair of the IPBES Steering Committee, says:
The Danish IPBES partnership has been a resounding success. We can see that we made the right decision when we chose to establish the office back in 2016 with the aim of helping to raise biodiversity higher on the political agenda and applying the vast number of important findings from the global IPBES reports. After all, we in Denmark can certainly learn from other countries, even though we often tend to think that it is only the rest of the world that has something to learn from us. We have developed expert opinions, educational materials, debate contributions, and opinion pieces designed to help decision-makers, young people, and many others understand what biodiversity is all about—and, not least, what the consequences might be if we continue to destroy it. I’ve said it many times before: nature needs space.
Over the past nearly 35 years, Carsten Rahbek has worked with biodiversity throughout his professional career, and he sees how the world is truly beginning to realize the importance of biodiversity, not least for the well-being of us all:
“I hope, then, that we will also begin to act accordingly, so that future generations will be offered the same conditions and opportunities that my generation has had,”says Carsten Rahbek.
Find the overview of IPBES Denmark’s activities for 2020–2022 here.
CBS: New Partner
From Copenhagen Business School, the new representative, Associate Professor Justine Grønbæk Pors, is looking forward to the collaboration:
The importance of involving the private and financial sectors in the discussion of biodiversity is really starting to sink in for everyone these days. We at Copenhagen Business School are very much looking forward to participating in this exciting collaboration on biodiversity. At the summit in Montreal, there was record-breaking participation from representatives of private companies and financial institutions, and everyone is now talking about incorporating biodiversity into the work of private companies and financial institutions, as well as conducting concrete assessments of the business sector’s dependence on and impact on biodiversity. We don’t know the details yet, but we do know that it’s a massive undertaking. At the same time, there needs to be documentation—and, not least, public disclosure—of such assessments, initially from large international companies. “We are entering an exciting time,” concludes Justine Grønbæk Pors.
Expansion of Communications Capabilities
Over the past year, the IPBES Secretariat has expanded to include a communications officer and student assistants, and it is stepping up its social media outreach to share both global findings from the IPBES reports and information about the situation in Denmark.
A hallmark of IPBES is its cross-sectoral approach, which is seen as absolutely essential for identifying realistic courses of action. Humans have created the current biodiversity crisis, and therefore we are the ones who can solve it. The IPBES collaboration carries out projects funded, among others, by the Aage V. Jensen Nature Foundation and the 15 June Foundation.
Over the past three years, the IPBES Secretariat has represented the Innovation Fund and the Ministry of the Environment in a European research collaboration on biodiversity—known as Biodiversa+. Lars Dinesen, a coordinator at the IPBES Secretariat, states:
I am pleased to have represented Denmark in this important partnership. One of the office’s most significant achievements has been bringing Denmark into this collaboration, because it channels EU funds back into the Danish research community, and there has been overwhelming support among researchers for the biodiversity partnership. Denmark is at the forefront of research.
An important element of a future communication strategy for the collaboration is therefore also to reach a broader segment of the population, explains Carsten Rahbek, adding:
We have developed a so-called webflow that, among other things, provides information about the global biodiversity crisis based on the international IPBES reports and focuses on nature in Denmark—both on land and at sea,
The Webflow is based, among other things, on a condensed summary of the IPBES global report and the findings from the two expert opinions resulting from the collaboration, which can be viewed here: The Nature Crisis Can Be Solved | IPBES Denmark
The new cooperation agreement is valid through the end of 2025, at which point the universities and the Ministry of the Environment will need to renew the agreement.
