Workshop on River Basin Management in the context of Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss
On October 30th and 31st 2024, the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN), the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences (CRAES) and UNEP-IEMP jointly organized the “3rd Young Researchers’ Workshop on River Basin Management in the Context of Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss - Fostering the Science-Policy Interface”. The workshop’s overall aim was to advance interdisciplinary research collaboration in the area of river basin management in the context of biodiversity loss and climate change, specifically between young researchers. It was held online and attended by researchers from China, Germany as well as partners from Asian, European and African countries. This is the third annual workshop in the series, and this year’s theme focused on river basin management.
In her welcome remarks, Prof. Linxiu Zhang, Director of UNEP-IEMP, stressed the important of role of science to support governments and all the stakeholders to take effective actions to tackle planetary crisis, including on the biodiversity loss, and Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework implementation. As UNEP-IEMP promotes South-South and South-North and triangular cooperation, UNEP-IEMP will continue to be part of this partnership with BfN and CRAES to co-organize this important series of workshop.
The workshop consisted of four presentation sessions, i.e. Ecological protection and restoration of large rivers; Predicting climate change impacts on major river basins; Basin-wide assessment, monitoring and evaluation; and Science pitches. These were mainly for young and senior researchers to share their latest research findings and good practices in river basin management for climate adaptation, mitigation and biodiversity conservation. The workshop also offered several interactive sessions, including the World Café, where the participants intensively discussed about research gaps, needs, science-policy interface, collaboration, communication and others.
As a key outcome, a briefing note/policy brief will be developed based on the workshop discussions.
