I suppose this is a big deal. After a couple of years of negotiations, countries agreed in Korea yesterday to go ahead with the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services — IPBES. You can read about it at Nature and the Guardian. Neither says anything about agriculture or wild relatives, although Professor Bob Watson, vice-chair of IPBES, says it will focus on “poverty alleviation, human well-being and sustainable development”. So far, so unsurprising. According to Nature, one of the problems for countries to agree to create IPBES was its scope, and it has been limited to “new topics” in biodiversity and ecosystem science.
That means we probably can’t look forward to an authoritative estimate of the extent of genetic erosion. Darn.