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Modern societies face a range of complex problems and continuous crises, such as climate change, social inequalities, and – notably – biodiversity loss. The urgency of biodiversity protection calls for greater ambition—in line with the Global Biodiversity Framework’s call for transformative change—which requires strengthened efforts and enhanced collaboration. Over the last decade, the landscape of biodiversity actors has become more diverse, extending beyond national platforms to include civil society groups e.g. from business, finance, citizen science, the arts, and even the World Biodiversity Forum itself. In this workshop, we bring together a diversity of biodiversity platforms and science-policy interfaces to share their experiences in creating and maintaining processes for knowledge synthesis, knowledge assessment and decision support. Using a systematic approach to understanding and categorising exchange formats at the science-policy interface, we explore intervention points, opportunities, and critical windows of action as well as the demands of emerging actors and emphasizes creating spaces for reflection, experimentation, and bridge-building across communities. Furthermore, it examines new forms of collaboration, including heterogeneous or non-traditional coalitions that may open novel pathways for integrating biodiversity research and policy.
The workshop will be structured in three sections:
(1) Creating a Community of Practice (CoP), diverse platforms are invited to shortly present themselves in a speed dating type session.
(2) Establishing a typology of biodiversity platforms and SPIs according to key criteria, including their target groups within policy and society, their roles at various stages of the policy making process, and their specific functions within these processes.
(3) Exploring approaches how to move from “grand challenges” to implementation in practice, focusing on inspiring formats addressing the demands of emerging actors and emphasizing creating spaces for reflection, experimentation, and bridge-building across communities.
This workshop offers a much-needed review and in-depth understanding of science–policy interaction mechanisms, providing practical insights for improving evidence-based collaboration in biodiversity contexts. Outcomes of the workshop will be prepared as a white paper and peer-reviewed publication.