The project of scientific support and coordination in establishing the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) was performed in behalf of the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (Bundesamt für Naturschutz BfN) and had a duration from mid 2012 to mid 2015. After the official founding of IPBES in April 2012 in Panama the project aimed at supporting the establishment of IPBES on a national and international level. International workshops were held concerning recent topics of the international development of IPBES and the workshops results were fed back into the global process. A first topic was the integration of so called ‘other forms of knowledge’ e.g. indigenous or traditional knowledge into IPBES assessments. The report of the workshop "Connecting diverse knowledge systems in the context of IPBES" from April 2013 can be downloaded here. A second workshop in August 2014 in the Philippines cared about "Indigenous valuation of biodiversity and ecosystem services compared to other ways of valuation in the context of IPBES". The report can be found here. The third Workshop (January 2015 Bonn/Germany) directly followed the third IPBES-Plenary and can be found here.
In all workshops more than 20 experts from different scientific disciplines and indigenous representatives from around the world developed theses on the integration of indigenous knowledge into IPBES and the valuation of such knowledge. The reports were forwarded to the IPBES secretariat and UNESCO. Another working area of the project was the relationship between CBD and IPBES, as the convention on the one hand asks the new platform for assessments on certain topics and on the other hand has to consider IPBES answers in it’s political decision making. Procedure for this interaction had to be developed. Via this project Dr. Axel Paulsch was regularly member of the German delegation to IPBES negotiations.