Biodiversity Conservation

Biodiversity conservation is critical for ensuring the diversity of living organisms, including terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Diverse assemblages of organisms are collectively the guardians of nature's services to humans, such as clean water, abundant food, a stable climate and culture. Brazil is the most biodiverse country in the world. The International Institute for Sustainability works to conserve biodiversity through its projects, considering not only its environmental but also its social and economic values.

Climate change

Global climate change is one of the biggest problems facing humanity today. The complexity of the scientific understanding of this phenomenon generates uncertainty, which makes it difficult to identify adaptation changes. IIS's work on climate change has focus on scaling adaptation, especially in cities.

Ecosystem restoration

Ecosystem restoration is vital to reducing and reversing historical human impacts on the environment, and can mitigate climate change, conserve biodiversity, and improve the quality of life for society through providing ecosystem services. A science-based approach to ecosystem restoration is critical for guiding restoration, and requires interdisciplinary research from theoretical and practical approaches. The importance of this work has grown exponentially in recent years.

Sustainable development

IIS's mission is to promote the transition to sustainability by contributing to the balance between socio-economic development and biodiversity conservation and rational use of natural resources, with the aim of meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising future generations.

Sustainable Land Use

Soil is the basis for the development of diverse life forms and plays a critical role for society by providing ecosystem services. In addition, it is full of stories that recount the way human beings have interacted with the earth. Over the last few centuries, this relationship between man and soil has become increasingly problematic, resulting in a high level of landscape transformation and degradation. These changes in land use and land cover have compromised the functioning of ecosystems with impacts on biogeochemical and hydrological cycles, which directly affect the climate and the provisioning of ecosystem services.

Economic Analysis

The projects developed by IIS are intended to strengthen the balance between the economy and the environment. The work of IIS includes research, planning, management and promotional activities in the public and private sectors, focusing on the relationship between ecological, social and economic systems. Economic analysis is used as a tool to optimize the means of production and public policies, as well as value and conserve natural heritage under a sustainable development perspective.

Public policies

IIS supports the formulation of public policies focused on sustainability, as well as the implementation of practical actions, working in partnership with public sector agencies such as the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment.

Spatial intelligence

Whether identifying areas at high risk of future deforestation or areas that have the highest value for conservation or restoration, landscape modelling and monitoring allows the identification of patterns and trends of social and ecological systems. These trends can provide quantitative statistics and mapped scenarios that directly inform decision making.

About > Internal collaborator

Related Themes

Fabio Scarano

Collaborator

Fabio Scarano is a Forest Engineer from Universidade Federal de Brasília (UNB), Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and member of the Linnean Society of London.
Professor of ecology at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) since 1993, also acted in the UN panels on climate (IPCC; 2011-2014) and biodiversity (IPBES; 2014-2017). Worked in companies in the Brazilian forest sector (1986-1988), as well at CAPES-MEC (2005-2011) as Research Director of the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden (2007-2009), Senior Vice President for the Americas of the NGO Conservation International (2009-2015) and Executive Director of the Brazilian Foundation for Sustainable Development (2015-2018).
Fabio has authored over 100 scientific publications on biodiversity, climate change and sustainability, and awarded the Jabuti Prize for the books Brazilian Biomes: Portraits of a Plural Country (2012) and Atlantic Forest: A History of the Future (2014). His current topics of interest include adaptation to climate change, the science-political interface in the socio-environmental arena, and the history and relationships between concepts and theories about nature, the biosphere, sustainability and Gaia.

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