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The potential for conservation of individual species has been greatly advanced by the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) development of objective, repeatable, and transparent criteria for assessing extinction risk that explicitly separate risk assessment from priority setting. At the IV World Conservation Congress in 2008, the process began to develop and implement comparable global standards for ecosystems. A working group established by the IUCN has begun formulating a system of quantitative categories and criteria, analogous to those used for species, for assigning levels of threat to ecosystems at local, regional, and global levels. A final system will require definitions of ecosystems; quantification of ecosystem status; identification of the stages of degradation and loss of ecosystems; proxy measures of risk (criteria); classification thresholds for these criteria; and standardized methods for performing assessments. The system will need to reflect the degree and rate of change in an ecosystem's extent, composition, structure, and function, and have its conceptual roots in ecological theory and empirical research. On the basis of these requirements and the hypothesis that ecosystem risk is a function of the risk of its component species, we propose a set of four criteria: recent declines in distribution or ecological function, historical total loss in distribution or ecological function, small distribution combined with decline, or very small distribution. Most work has focused on terrestrial ecosystems, but comparable thresholds and criteria for freshwater and marine ecosystems are also needed. These are the first steps in an international consultation process that will lead to a unified proposal to be presented at the next World Conservation Congress in 2012.Establecimiento de Criterios para la Lista Roja de UICN de Ecosistemas AmenazadosResumenEl potencial para la conservación de muchas especies ha avanzado enormemente porque la Unión Internacional para la Conservación de la Naturaleza (UICN) ha desarrollado criterios objetivos, repetibles y transparentes para evaluar el riesgo de extinción que explícitamente separa la evaluación de riesgo de la definición de prioridades. En el IV Congreso Mundial de Conservación en 2008, el proceso comenzó a desarrollar e implementar estándares globales comparables para ecosistemas. Un grupo de trabajo establecido por la UICN ha formulado un sistema inicial de categorías y criterios cuantitativos, análogos a los utilizados para especies, para asignar niveles de amenaza a ecosistemas a niveles local, regional y global. Un sistema final requerirá de definiciones de ecosistemas; cuantificación del estatus de ecosistemas; identificación de las etapas de degradación y pérdida de los ecosistemas; medidas de riesgo (criterios) alternativas; umbrales de clasificación para esos criterios y métodos estandarizados para la realización de evaluaciones. El sistema deberá reflejar el nivel y tasa de cambio en la extensión, composición, estructura y funcio...

Any near-term gains in reducing extreme poverty will be maintained only if environmental sustainability is also achieved.

Table of Contents This chapter assesses how countries are managing current and projected disaster risks, given knowledge of how risks are changing with observations and projections of weather and climate extremes [Table 3-2, 3.3], vulnerability and exposure [4.3], and impacts [4.4]. It focuses on the design of national systems for managing such risks, the roles played by actors involved in the system, and the functions they perform, acknowledging that complementary actions to manage risks are also taken at local and international level as described in Chapters 5 and 7. National systems are at the core of countries' capacity to meet the challenges of observed and projected trends in exposure, vulnerability, and weather and climate extremes (high agreement, robust evidence). Effective national systems comprise multiple actors from national and sub-national governments, private sector, research bodies, and civil society, including community-based organizations, playing differential but complementary roles to manage risk according to their accepted functions and capacities. These actors work in partnership across temporal, spatial, administrative, and social scales, supported by relevant scientific and traditional knowledge. Specific characteristics of national systems vary between countries and across scales depending on their socio-cultural, political, and administrative environments and development status. [6.2] The national level plays a key role in governing and managing disaster risks because national government is central to providing risk management-related public goods as it commonly maintains financial and organizational authority in planning and implementing these goods (high agreement, robust evidence). National governments are charged with the provision of public goods such as ensuring the economic and social wellbeing, safety, and security of their citizens from disasters, including the protection of the poorest and most vulnerable citizens. They also control budgetary allocations as well as creating legislative frameworks to guide actions by other actors. Often, national governments are considered to be the 'insurer of last resort'. In line with the delivery of public goods, national governments and public authorities 'own' a large part of current and future disaster risks (public infrastructure, public assets, and relief spending). In terms of managing risk, national governments act as risk aggregators and by pooling risk, hold a large portfolio of public liabilities. This provides governments responsibility to accurately quantify and manage risks associated with this portfolio-functions that are expected to become more important given projected impacts of climate change and trends in vulnerability and exposure. [6.2.1] In providing such public goods, governments choose to manage disaster risk by enabling national systems to guide and support stakeholders to reduce risk where possible, transfer risk where feasible, and manage residual risk, recognizing that risks can never be totally eliminated (high ...

Ecosystem services are increasingly incorporated into explicit policy targets and can be an effective tool for informing decisions about the use and management of the planet's resources, especially when trade-offs and synergies need to be taken into account. The challenge is to find meaningful and robust indicators to quantify ecosystem services, measure changes in demand and supply and predict future direction. 39 collecting such observations and data on ecosystem services. Biodiversity regulates the ability of the ecosystem to supply ecosystem services, can be directly harvested to meet people's material needs, and are valued by societies for its non-tangible contributions to well-being. Societies are deeply embedded within ecosystems, depending on and influencing the ecosystem services they produce. The different types of ecosystem services (provisioning, regulating, and cultural), and their different components (supply, delivery, contribution to well-being, and value) can be monitored at global to local scales. Different data sources are best suited to account for different components of ecosystem services and spatial scales and include: 40 P. Balvanera et al.census data at national scales, remote sensing, field-based estimations, community monitoring, and models. Data availability, advantages and limitations of each are discussed. Progress towards monitoring different types of services and gaps are explored. Ways of exploring synergies and trade-offs among services and stakeholders, using scenarios to predict future ecosystem services, and including stakeholders in monitoring ecosystem services are discussed. The need of a network for monitoring ecosystem services to synergise efforts is stressed. Monitoring ecosystem services is vital for informing policy (or decision making) to protect human well-being and the natural systems upon which it relies at different scales. Using this information in decision making across all scales will be central to our endeavours to transform to more sustainable and equitable futures.

Summary Objectives: As millions of consumers perform health information retrieval online, the mismatch between their terminology and the terminologies of the information sources could become a major barrier to successful retrievals. To address this problem, we studied the characteristics of consumer terminology for health information retrieval. Methods: Our study focused on consumer queries that were used on a consumer health service Web site and a consumer health information Web site. We analyzed data from the site-usage logs and conducted interviews with patients. Results: Our findings show that consumers’ information retrieval performance is very poor. There are significant mismatches at all levels (lexical, semantic and mental models) between the consumer terminology and both the information source terminology and standard medical vocabularies. Conclusions: Comprehensive terminology support on all levels is needed for consumer health information retrieval.

Biodiversity is not evenly distributed across the globe and some areas have greater potential to contribute to biodiversity conservation than others. Whilst there are multiple ways to determine priority areas for conservation, for a global institution like the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the funding mechanism for the Convention on Biological Diversity and the largest multilateral source of funding for developing countries focused on enhancing biodiversity outcomes and promoting sustainable use, it is important to fund the top-ranked countries whilst also ensuring that all eligible countries are able to undertake some biodiversity conservation actions in accordance with the Convention. To this end, the GEF uses the System for Transparent Allocation of Resources (STAR) to allocate funding in separate funding rounds to eligible countries. This country focus means that all prioritization analyses need to be undertaken within that political framework, while also considering the intrinsic patterns in biodiversity that don't respect national borders. We present the 2018 update of the biodiversity component of GEF-STAR, investigate how the weighting system affects the ranking of countries. We show that top ranked and bottom ranked countries are robust to changes in the weighting of analytical elements, but the weighting can significantly alter the importance of middle ranking countries, affecting their funding allocation. This analysis has been used by the GEF, along with other data, to allocate over $1 billion in biodiversity funding (GEF-7 = $1.2 billion) to improve country and global prospects for conservation. However, this large funding allocation for conservation needs to be set against the vastly larger funding flows that decrease natural values around the world, and the need for systems level change remains evident across the entire planet.

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