Victoria Reyes-García, expert at the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment
ICTA-UAB researcher Victoria Reyes-García was one of the experts selected by the IPBES (Intergovernmental Panel for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) to participate in the Transformative Change Assessment, the First Author Meeting of which took place in Montpellier, France.
Anthropologist Victoria Reyes-García was involved as a Coordinating Lead Author of Chapter 5: “Realizing a sustainable world for nature and people: means for transformative strategies, actions and roles for all”.
This new IPBES work programme, launched earlier this year, includes a thematic assessment of transformative change whose objective would be to understand and identify factors in human society at both the individual and collective levels, including behavioural, social, cultural, economic, institutional, technical and technological dimensions, that may be leveraged to bring about transformative change for the conservation, restoration and wise use of biodiversity, while taking into account broader social and economic goals in the context of sustainable development.
The IPBES Plenary, at IPBES 8 (June 2021) approved the undertaking of the transformative change assessment as outlined in the “Scoping report for a thematic assessment of the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, and the determinants of transformative change and options for achieving the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity (transformative change assessment)”.
The scoping document outlines the purpose and policy context of the assessment, how it will be done, and what the chapters should cover. The scoping document defines transformative change as “a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values, needed for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, long-term human wellbeing and sustainable development”. The assessment looked across the state of current knowledge, recognizing different worldviews and types of knowledge (including mainstream science and Indigenous and local knowledge) in order to assess different understandings of transformation, visions of a sustainable world, how transformative change occurs, challenges to achieving transformation, options to achieve transformation.
Therefore, Victoria Reyes-García's experience in the field of Indigenous and local knowledge, and its importance in transformative change management, was critical.