Sandra Luque: at the heart of global biodiversity research

Last February, more than 150 members approved IPBES’s first assessment report on business and biodiversity, entitled “The Impact and Dependence of Business on Biodiversity and Nature’s Contributions to People”. The report shows that global financial flows that harm nature—notably environmentally damaging public subsidies and private investment in sectors that put significant pressure on biodiversity—amount to $7,300 billion a year, while only $220 billion is channelled towards conservation and restoration. This means that 30 times more financial resources are directed towards activities that harm nature than towards protecting it. Behind these figures lie years of scientific work by hundreds of experts, who analysed and synthesised thousands of studies alongside their own research.

Sandra Luque joined this international initiative following the Nagoya conference in 2010, where she became aware of the limits of research in shaping international negotiations. Having led several European projects, she hoped her findings would feed more effectively into discussions and decisions. “Despite our efforts to make a difference, however, however, we saw little tangible change,,which convinced us that we needed to get more directly involved”. 

Why IPBES? 

This period marks a turning point in the relationship between science and policy on biodiversity. The world had failed to meet its 2010 targets for halting biodiversity loss. A few months before the Nagoya conference, governments meeting in Busan, South Korea, had already recognised the need to better connect scientific knowledge with public decision-making and agreed in principle to establish an intergovernmental platform dedicated to biodiversity and ecosystem services.

In Nagoya, member states welcomed the proposal and encouraged its implementation. Two years later, in April 2012, IPBES was officially established in Panama as an independent intergovernmental platform.  

“This intergovernmental body helps identify policy-relevant tools and methodologies and promote their use by governments”, Sandra Luque explains. The platform brings together experts who assess the state of scientific knowledge on biodiversity and prepare a summary for policymakers, which is then adopted by representatives of the member states.

This approach makes IPBES assessment reports particularly influential in the public debate. Its first global assessment, published in 2019, marked a turning point by estimating that 1 million animal and plant species were threatened with extinction. “This report provided figures, and that is what politicians want—numbers that show where we stand and why we are talking about a crisis,” says Sandra Luque. Presented to more than 130 delegations, the assessment received widespread international attention. For Sandra Luque, it was a particularly significant moment: for the first time, heads of state from several countries—including France—referred publicly to the findings and figures from the assessment. 

This work subsequently informed the negotiations that led, three years later, to the adoption of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which sets quantified biodiversity targets: protecting 30 per cent of land and seas and restoring 30 per cent of degraded ecosystems by 2030.

Measuring biodiversity to track commitments  

Verifying whether these commitments are being met remains a challenge, as biodiversity monitoring systems are fragmented and vary depending on the region and the issues at stake. IPBES not only assesses the state of biodiversity, as in its 2019 report, but also evaluates the methods used to measure it. This is the aim of the Monitoring Assessment, conducted over several years by dozens of experts: to catalogue available data, methods and infrastructure, and identify what is still needed to monitor the state of biodiversity, the causes of its changes and its benefits to human populations (food production, energy, air and water quality, crop pollination, climate regulation, etc.). Its conclusions will be used to measure progress towards the Global Biodiversity Framework targets and inform the next IPBES Global Assessment of the State of the Living World, due in 2028, which will update the findings from 2019. 

Sandra Luque is one of the authors of Chapter 3 of this assessment, where she focuses in particular on observation systems and monitoring infrastructure. She is responsible for the section on Earth observation systems, in which satellite observation plays a central role.  “The growing range of sensors and satellites now makes it possible to monitor biodiversity much more accurately, particularly over time. We can no longer do without the technologies developed by space agencies."

This approach does, however, have two limitations. Firstly, satellites do not measure biodiversity directly; rather, they enable us to assess its state through signals detected, as an example,from vegetation—a challenge Sandra Luque has worked on for 40 years, more recently, through her contribution to defining some of the Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs), a framework advocated by GEO BON, the global network of researchers coordinating biodiversity monitoring internationally. Secondly, without in situ surveys, these signals cannot be calibrated or validated, creating a paradox: just as satellites are at their most powerful, the field surveys needed to validate them are becoming increasingly rare due to a lack of funding. As Sandra Luque points out, “resources for forest and botanical surveys are becoming increasingly scarce, raising the question of how researchers can make do with what remains”.

A pilot project in Costa Rica 

Sandra Luque also addresses these issues daily in her own research. Under her leadership, a project developed at INRAE’s Land, Environment, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information joint research unit (TETIS) in Montpellier, supported by CNES, is exploring the potential of this approach in tropical forests, with Costa Rica serving as a country-wide pilot. These forests are home to exceptional biodiversity and face growing human pressures—deforestation, land-use change and fragmentation—but remain difficult to map due to a lack of field surveys. Yet their conservation lies at the heart of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s objectives. She stresses the urgency of restoration, pointing out that “we need to know what, where and how. If we don’t plant the right species, it’s all for nothing.” 

Supported by CNES and linked to the work of CEOS, the project integrates three types of imagery within a Data Cube: optical imagery to identify vegetation cover, hyperspectral imagery to distinguish the unique signatures of different types of vegetation, and radar imagery to measure the vertical structure of forests despite cloud cover. Together, these enable us to characterise the composition, functioning and ecological integrity of forest stands—in particular secondary forests, which now make up the majority of tropical forests—with the aim of measuring their actual contribution to biodiversity and landscape resilience.

This project is being carried out in collaboration with Costa Rican institutions, notably as part of Maïri Souza Oliveira’s PhD research. An initial study published in Ecology and Evolution, in collaboration with CIRAD, combined field data on nearly 500 tree species with freely available Sentinel-2 imagery to automatically map the country’s forest types. The aim was to produce spatial indicators—useful for both research and forest management—to inform conservation and restoration priorities and assess the coverage of protected areas.

Building expertise, preserving scientific independence

At IPBES, the key challenge is precisely to compare these observations over time and across regions. By providing repeated, spatially explicit and comparable observations at different scales, Earth observation systems enable us to move from scattered data to a dynamic, spatial view of biodiversity and how it is changing. This is essential for developing indicators that are consistent over time and across regions, and for monitoring progress towards international conservation targets. The scientific evidence must then be synthesised before being submitted for intergovernmental validation—the most delicate stage of the process—which underpins IPBES’s legitimacy while also exposing it to political pressures.

The experts’ independence provides a safeguard against these pressures. Nominated at national level, they are then selected by the IPBES Multidisciplinary Expert Panel (MEP) solely on the basis of their expertise. They serve in their own capacity, rather than as representatives of their countries. “This allows our American colleagues to continue to make their voices heard amid widespread attacks on biodiversity. Similarly, it allows Argentine researchers to speak out in a context where laws are being passed to exploit resources—particularly water—without restraint”. At a time when several states are withdrawing from multilateral bodies, this scientific independence is essential to maintaining a common scientific voice.

As with climate change and the IPCC, several IPBES colleagues take part in national delegations at biodiversity COPs, where they are expected to provide figures and compelling evidence to support discussions and make a convincing case, helping governments to reverse current trends. The private sector must also recognise what is at stake, Luque insists. “We cannot continue to make profits, particularly in agriculture, without taking biodiversity into account. If we destroy everything, everyone stands to lose,” warns the researcher, who hopes that, step by step, we can continue to restore our forests, lakes and natural environments.