As part of the capacity-building work of the IPBES task force on scenarios and models, aimed at improving the uptake and use of scenarios and models by a broad range of policymakers and stakeholders, I am pleased to invite you to an online webinar on the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Scenarios-based Model Intercomparison (BES-SIM). The webinar will be held on 8 April 2022 at 1 p.m. CEST and is organized by the task force on scenarios and models, with the support of the task force on capacity-building.

The IPBES expert group on scenarios and models, active between IPBES 4 and IPBES 7, within its mandate to support the use of scenarios and models in IPBES assessments and to catalyse the development of scenarios and models by the broader scientific community, fostered collaborations between the integrated assessment modelling community and the biodiversity and ecosystem services modelling community.  In a collaborative exercise, the two communities developed a procedure for using existing IPCC scenarios to project the global impacts of land-use and climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem services, as well as to compare the results across models. This collaborative exercise, referred to as “Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Scenarios-based Model Intercomparison (BES-SIM)”, fostered a community of practice on global biodiversity and ecosystem services modelling, which made a synthesis of results available for use in the IPBES Global Assessment of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

The webinar will include a presentation on the BES-SIM exercise and its results, followed by a question-and-answer session.