APBON- Biodiversity in the Asia-Pacific

Summary:

Asia is a global biodiversity hotspot, but also a hotspot of biodiversity loss, with some of the highest rates of tropical mining, and deforestation, as well as high rates of wildlife harvest and extraction. It is also a uniquely challenging area to work, given the huge diversity of languages, which poses a major barrier to coordinated work across the region. Within this event we gauge the state of data for the Asia-Pacific region. The session will focus on our longer term program across the region, exploring the representativeness of existing data across space, time and taxa, discuss regional priorities for research and conservation, and how we can reconcile both pervasive data gaps in a biodiversity hotspot, and develop solutions to barriers to accessing data which may have been collected, but remains in private or government plans. We will also explore the essential biodiversity variables from an Asian-Pacific context, determining if sufficient data has been collected, and if the current variables adequately reflect the needs of a tropical biodiversity hotspot. Lastly we discuss conservation planning, identifying areas for Target 3 of the KM-GBF, and discuss the barriers to data collation, and translation into policy changes. The session should be widely relevant, as many of these issues are prevalent across many tropical regions, and thus provides common lessons on how to address these challenges.

Speakers:

• Sunita Chaudhary (International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, ICIMOD
• Alice Hughes (University of Hong Kong)