IPBES announcement: External review now open for the Americas assessment

The period for the external review of the regional assessment for the Americas is from 29 May until 24 July 2017. The external review of the IPBES regional assessments of biodiversity and ecosystem services for Africa, Asia-Pacific and Europe and Central Asia, as well as the IPBES land degradation and restoration assessment is currently ongoing and will run until 26 June 2017.
 
Experts and Governments wishing to review the Americas regional assessment will first need to register as users of the IPBES website (http://www.ipbes.net/user/register?destination=sod-review) if they have not already done so. They can then apply to become an IPBES external reviewer for individual chapters of the assessment as well as for the summary for policymakers at www.ipbes.net/sod-review (this will only work when logged in first as IPBES website users). They will immediately receive an email providing confidential access to the draft chapters and summary for policymakers and will be requested to submit their comments in English using a template that is available on the same webpage. All relevant comments will then be addressed by the assessment authors in the next round of revisions.

Finally, as part of IPBES' efforts to encourage and support Government engagement in the external review, a series of assessment-specific webinars have been recorded. The objective of the webinars is to explain the scope of the respective assessments, to describe what a summary for policymakers (including its key messages) entails and to provide examples from each respective SPM to illustrate these processes. The co-chairs of each of the assessments present the webinar for their assessment. The webinars for the Africa, Asia-Pacific and Europe and Central Asia regional assessments and for the land degradation and restoration assessment are already available online, on the same webpage that also contains the chapters and summaries for policymakers of those assessments. You will thus be able to access the webinars after having registered and logged in as external reviewer. The webinar for the Americas assessment will be made available online by 16 June 2017. The webinar for the Africa regional assessment is available both in English and in French and the webinar for the Americas regional assessment will be presented in both English and Spanish.

Anyone who has already registered as an external reviewer for the Americas assessment can now use the weblink that was provided in the email received upon registering, to access the Americas assessment. 

For mor information, please see here.