Keynote speakers & panellists

Throughout the week different keynote speakers addressed the conference theme from their experience and reflected on the science, policy or practice of the role of ecosystem services for a sustainable future.

Below an overview is given of the keynote speakers. Click the presentation titles below to view the presentations in PDF.

Monday 21 October

10:30-12:00 Opening

• Benjamin Burkhard, (Chair ESP10 conference/ Leibniz University Hannover, Germany) "Opening and welcome to ESP10 conference"
• Peter Wriggers, (Vice-President Leibniz University Hannover)
• Rudolf de Groot - Chair Ecosystem Services Partnership, The Netherlands

10 years Ecosystem Services Partnership

• Robert Costanza - Co-chair Ecosystem Services Partnership, Australia

ES(P) for a sustainable future

• Elena Bennett - McGill University, Canada

 Advances and Challenges in ES science since MEA

13:30-15:00 Plenary session

• Christiane Paulus - Ministry of Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear

Ecosystem services and natural capital – a new paradigm for Biodiversity Policy

• Louise Willemen - University of Twente, The Netherlands

It's about time: advancing spatial analyses of ecosystem services and their application

Article in ECOSER based on Louise Willemen's keynote speech.

• Panel discussion with keynote speakers

Tuesday  22 October

08:45-10:00 Plenary session

• Anne Larigauderie (Executive Secretary, Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), France) "IPBES: Harnessing the power of science to inform decision making towards 2020 and beyond"
• Berta Martín-López (Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany) "Plural valuation of ecosystem services matters for science – policy interface”

Thursday 24 October

08:45-10:00 Plenary session

• Lucy Emerton - Environment Management Group, UK

Building the economic and business case for investing in ecosystem services

• Panel discussion with representatives from the business sector: "Advancing Business and Science collaboration". Panellists are: Carolyn Jewell (Biodiversity and Natural Resources Senior Manager, HeidelbergCement), representatives from HIPP, and a financial institute are to be confirmed. Moderator: Lucy Emerton.

Friday 25 October

10:30-12:00 Plenary session

• Hans Bruyninckx  (Executive Director, European Environment Agency, Belgium) “Moving beyond ecosystem (ab)use towards fundamental sustainability"
• Panel on “The future of ES research, policy and practice”; including among others Anne Teller, Klaus Töpfer, Hans Bruyninckx, Sofia Leser D’Ambrosio.

Biographies

Elena Bennett is an Associate Professor in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences and the McGill School of Environment. She received her BA in Biology and Environmental Studies from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1994, earned her MSc in Land Resources in 1999 (U. Wisconsin) and her PhD in Limnology and Marine Sciences in 2002 (U. Wisconsin). Her work focuses on the interactions among ecosystem services and how we can manage these interactions for more multifunctional working landscapes. She was the leader of the Montérégie Connection project that aimed to work with stakeholders to understand the role of landscape connectivity in the provision of about a dozen ecosystem services and how those might change across a range of future scenarios. She is now Scientific Director and Lead PI on ResNet, a project that links working landscapes across Canada to develop a multi-scale platform for measuring, modelling, and managing ecosystem services and understanding the role of natural capital in their provision. Dr. Bennett was a Leopold Leadership Fellow (2012) and a Trottier Public Policy Professor (2013-2014).  She won the Macdonald Campus Award for (Undergraduate) Teaching Excellence in 2012 and the Carrie M. Derick Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision in 2013. She was an NSERC EWR Steacie Fellow from 2017 until 2019, and is a member of the College of New Scholars of the Royal Society of Canada.

Hans Bruyninckx has worked at European Environment Agency (EEA) since 2003 and now serves as Executive Director. His work focus is on political-oriented research. Over the last 20 years, he has conducted and managed policy-oriented research in the areas of environmental politics, climate change, and sustainable development in which his main domains are policy evaluation, monitoring and reporting, methodology development, environmental policy integration, and more recently also on long-term transition policies.His experience pertains to the level of the regions (Flanders in a comparative European perspective), the EU Member States, the EU level, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and processes of global environmental governance (climate change in particular).

During his career, Hans Bruyninckx has conducted research in more than a dozen different countries. He was also involved in numerous policy processes as an advisory board member, involved in steering groups of government agencies, and as academic policy advisor to governmental agencies and other key actors. In addition, he has worked intensely with civil society and business actors, in support of public-private initiatives or private regulatory approaches to environmental, climate change and sustainability issues.

Benjamin Burkhard is a geographer and landscape ecologist teaching and working with transdisciplinary human-environmental system analyses in various national and international R&D projects. He is Full Professor of Physical Geography and head of the Institute of Physical Geography and Landscape Ecology at Leibniz University Hannover. He is currently Coordinator of the EU H2020 project ESMERALDA and involved in many other international and national projects, research initiatives and networks.

His main research focus is on landscape ecology, landscape structures, and process analyses, mapping of ecosystem service supply and demand and applications in environmental management. He is Secretary of the Ecosystem Services Partnership ESP and Deputy Secretary General of the International Association of Landscape Ecology IALE. His publication record includes numerous peer-reviewed papers, book chapters and nine edited Special Issues and one edited book on mapping ecosystem services. Burkhard is editor-in-chief of One Ecosystem – Ecology and Sustainability Data Journal. His teaching activities include classes on human-environmental system analysis, ecosystem services,agro-ecology, landscape sciences, Physical Geography and GIS at BSc, MSc and Ph.D. level. He supervised numerous BSc, MSc and Ph.D. thesis.

Robert Costanza is a co-chair of the Ecosystem Services Partnership. He also serves as a Chair in Public Policy at Crawford School of Public Policy and works on the editorial board of ten other international academic journals. He is a co-editor in chief of Solutions (www.thesolutionsjournal.org), with Ida Kubiszewski, a unique hybrid academic/popular journal. His awards include a Kellogg National Fellowship, the Society for Conservation Biology Distinguished Achievement Award, a Pew Scholarship in Conservation and the Environment, the Kenneth Boulding Memorial Award for Outstanding Contributions in Ecological Economics, and honorary doctorates from Stockholm University and the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon.

Robert Constanza is co-founder and past-president of the International Society for Ecological Economics, and was chief editor of the society’s journal, Ecological Economics from its inception in 1989 until 2002. His transdisciplinary research integrates the study of humans and the rest of nature to address research, policy and management issues at multiple time and space scales, from small watersheds to the global system.

Robert Constanza is the author or co-author of over 500 scientific papers and 27 books. His work has been cited in more than 19,000 scientific articles in ISI and he has been named as one of ISI’s Highly Cited Researchers since 2004. More than 300 interviews and reports on his work have appeared in various popular media in which his specialties include transdisciplinary integration, systems ecology, ecological economics, landscape ecology, ecological modeling, ecological design, energy analysis, environmental policy, social traps, incentive structures and institutions.

Rudolf de Groot is Associate Professor in Integrated Ecosystem Assessment & Management with the Environmental Systems Analysis Group of Wageningen University, the Netherlands. He is a Landscape Ecologist by training and has worked for more than 35 years on the use of ecosystem services as a tool for sustainable planning, management and decision making.

De Groot was involved as Coordinating Lead author in the UN-supported Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2001-2005) www.maweb.org and in the global study on “The Economics of Ecosystems & Biodiversity” (TEEB 2008-2010) www.teebweb.org (leading the Conceptual Framework chapter and the development of a database on monetary values of Ecosystem Services).
From 2010 to 2018 he was Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal on “Biodiversity Science, Ecosystem Services and Management” (Taylor & Francis) and from January 2019 he is Editor-in-Chief of the Elsevier Journal “Ecosystem Services: Science, Policy & Practice”. He published numerous papers and since 2018 is listed among the top 1% most cited researchers on cross-disciplinary topics.

Next to his scientific work he is passionate about the practical applications of the ecosystem services concept. He is among others Special Advisor on Ecosystem Services and Nature Based Solutions of the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management (CEM), member of the Steering Committee of the UNEP International Resource Panel and Chair of the Ecosystem Services Partnership (www.es-partnership.org), a worldwide network to enhance the science and practical application of ecosystem services assessment.

Lucy Emerton is an environmental economist specialising in biodiversity and ecosystem valuation, and the development of innovative conservation finance and incentive mechanisms. Over the last 30 years she has worked as advisor to DFID, GIZ, the African Wildlife Foundation, Wildlife Conservation Society, World Bank, WWF, UNDP, UNEP, FAO and the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), established and led IUCN’s environmental economics programmes in Africa, Asia and at the Global level, and provided technical advice and backstopping to a wide variety of other organisations and governments across almost 70 countries worldwide.
Lucy is currently Conservation Economics and Finance Director of the Environment Management Group, a consultancy group and think-tank providing business planning advice and technical support in environmental sustainability to the corporate sector, governments and international agencies.

Anne Larigauderie is the first Executive Secretary of IPBES, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. She was appointed by the Executive Director of UNEP in February 2014.

Anne Larigauderie received her master’s degree in plant molecular biology from the University of Toulouse, France, and her PhD in plant ecology, from the Université des Sciences et Techniques du Languedoc and CNRS in Montpellier, France.

As a plant ecologist, she spent ten years performing experimental and field work at different institutions looking, in particular, at how climate change will affect plant physiology and ecology in various contexts: study of gas exchange in first pilot project performing CO2 enrichment of natural ecosystems in the arctic tundra (San Diego State University, USA), of root competition for nutrients in California grasslands (University of California – Davis, USA), of responses of grass species to various scenarios of elevated CO2 and temperature (Duke University, USA), and of the adaptation of dark respiration of alpine plant species to future elevated temperatures (University of Basel, Switzerland).

She is the former Executive Director of DIVERSITAS, the international programme dedicated to biodiversity science, under the auspices of ICSU and UNESCO, which became in January 2015, a component of the new future earth programme for global sustainability.
In 2010, she was made "Chevalier de l'Ordre national de la légion d'honneur" by the French Government (Ministre de l'Education et de la Recherche)

Berta Martín-López is Professor at the Faculty of Sustainability of Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany. With a PhD in Ecology and Environmental Sciences, and many years of undertaking applied research, Berta focuses on analysing the dynamics of social-ecological systems at different scales, from local to global. She has been editor of the IPBES Pollinators Assessment and coordinating lead author for the IPBES Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services for Europe and Central Asia. In addition to her commitment as Co-Editor in Chief of the ‘Ecosystems and People’ journal, she serves as editorial board member of Ecology & Society and One Earth. She is also Co-Chair of the Programme for Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) of Future Earth.

Christiane Paulus was born on March 22, 1961 in Düsseldorf, Germany. She began her studies in 1987 at Bonn University where she majored in biology. Christiane later earned her PhD in 1991. Since 1990, she has worked in the federal and international sectors with a focus on the environment and climate change. She had held positions at German Federal Parliament, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety. Her work concentrates on international climate policy, protected areas, the environmental impact of biotechnology and genetic engineering, equal rights and nature conservation. As from January 2019 Christiane serves as a Director-General of the Directorate “Nature Conservation and Sustainable Use of Natural Resources”.

Anne Teller is Senior expert in the Directorate-General Environment of the European Commission. She graduated as a Forest Engineer from the University of Brussels and completed her Master of Science in Forest and its relation to Land Management at Oxford University. Anne has more than thirty years experience in European environmental policy. She has worked at regional, national and European level. Her specific domain of interest is the improvement of the knowledge and evidence base for environment policy. Anne is currently supporting the first EU wide ecosystem assessment to support biodiversity policy.

Peter Wriggers obtained his Dr.-Ing degree at the University Hannover in 1980 on “Contact-impact problems”. In 1990 he was appointed as Full Professor at the Institute of Mechanics at TH Darmstadt. Since 2008, Peter has been a director of the Institute of Continuum Mechanics in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Leibniz Universität Hannover. 

Peter Wriggers is a member of the “Braunschweigische Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft”, the Academy of Science and Literature in Mainz, the German National Academy of Engineering “acatech” and the National Academy of Croatia. He was President of GAMM, President of GACM and Vice-President of IACM. Furthermore, he acts as Editor-in-Chief for the International Journal “Computational Mechanics” and “Computational Particle Mechanics” and is member of 15 Editorial Boards. He was awarded the Fellowship of IACM and received the “Computational Mechanics Award” of IACM, the “Euler Medal” of ECCOMAS and the “IACM Award” of IACM as well as three honorary degrees from the Universities of Poznan, ENS Cachan and TU Darmstadt.

Louise Willemen has worked on ecosystem services and rural development issues since 2003. Her research primarily focusses on making quantitative spatial information on ecosystem services available to support multi-objective decision making in agricultural areas. Her current research includes Remote Sensing-based ecosystem service mapping and monitoring, impact assessments of integrated restoration, and prioritization of investments in land degradation neutrality actions in the Global South. She contributes to bridging science-policy through her role as Coordinating Lead Author of the Land Degradation and Restoration assessment of IPBES, she is a member of ESP’s Executive Committee and leads Working Groups, and does editorial work for several journals.

Louise Willemen has a PhD in spatial modelling from Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and a MSc degree from the same university in Tropical Land Use studies (specialization in plant production systems and GIS). She has worked at several science and policy organizations including Bioversity International in Colombia, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Italy, Cornell University in the USA, and has collaborated with many on-the-ground public and private partners.