Large Portfolio

David A. Cleaves, US Forest Service Climate change is a major concern to the US Forest Service. Most of the urgent forest and grassland management challenges of the past 20 years, such as wildfires, changing water regimes, and ex­panding forest insect infestations, have been driven, in part, by a changing climate. Future impacts are projected to be even more severe. These im­pacts necessitate the use of evaluation processes to determine the nature and extent of current and predicted impacts as well as the organisational capacity of the US Forest Service to respond to climate-induced disturbances. We developed a Climate... Read More ››

Andrew Pullin, Centre for Evidence-Based Conservation at Bangor University With international initiatives taking major steps forward on biodiversity data, monitoring and evalua­tion, it becomes increasingly urgent to make knowledge derived from these initiatives accessible for decision-making. Discussions about IPBES and other approaches to improve the science-policy inter­face have shown that it is not easy to formu­late a single approach to address the topic of biodiversity and ecosystem services for several reasons: (i) the knowl­edge available is scattered across many disciplines, organisations, institutions and individual experts and often col­lected using a range of protocols; (ii) loss of biodiversity and ecosystem... Read More ››

Sofie Bouteligier, Wageningen University; Han Vandevyvere, KU Leuven; Bart Ver­coutere, Royal Haskoning; Hans Bruyninckx, HIVA – KU Leuven In the search for more sustainable ways of living, policymakers look for initiatives that have fruitfully contributed to achieving this goal elsewhere. This has led to a proliferation of data­bases with so-called best practices. In the domain of urban environmental governance, both international organisa­tions (e.g. UN-Habitat) and city networks (e.g. the C40 Climate Leader­ship Group) have gathered information on successful policies with the aim that will be repli­cated elsewhere. Also private actors (e.g. multinational environmental consultancies) make play with achievements in... Read More ››