Skip to main content

Glossary definitions

The IPBES glossary terms definitions page provides definitions of terms used in IPBES assessments. Some definitions in this online glossary have been edited for consistency. Please refer to the specific assessment glossary for citations/authorities of definitions. 

We invite you to report any errors or omissions to [email protected].

Concept Definition Deliverable(s)
livelihood diversification

Livelihood diversification is defined as the process by which rural families construct a diverse portfolio of activities and social support capabilities in their struggle for survival and in order to improve their standards of living”.

Sustainable use assessment
livelihood resilience

The capacity of all people across generations to sustain and improve their livelihood opportunities and well-being despite environmental, economic, social and political disturbances.

Land degradation and restoration assessment
livelihood security

Adequate and sustainable access to income and resources to meet basic needs (including adequate access to food, potable water, health facilities, educational opportunities, housing, time for community participation and social integration).

Land degradation and restoration assessment
living in harmony with nature

Within the context of the IPBES Conceptual Framework - a perspective on good quality of life based on the interdependence that exists among human beings, other living species and elements of nature. It implies that we should live peacefully alongside all other organisms even though we may need to exploit other organisms to some degree.

Asia-Pacific assessment, Europe and Central Asia assessment, Africa assessment, Americas assessment, Sustainable use assessment, Scenarios and models assessment
local

adj. Referring to places, people, things or events within a short distance of an identified locality.

Pollination assessment
local communities

Local communities” refers to non-indigenous communities with historical linkages to places and livelihoods characterized by long- term relationships with the natural environment, often over generations.

Sustainable use assessment
local community

A group of individuals that interact within their immediate surroundings and/or direct mutual influences in their daily life. In this sense, a rural village, a clan in transhumance or the inhabitants of an urban neighbourhood can be considered a local community, but not all the inhabitants of a district, a city quarter or even a rural town. A local community could be permanently settled or mobile.

Pollination assessment
local ecological knowledge

Knowledge about nature, including organisms (animals and plants), ecosystems and ecological interactions, held by local people who interact with and use natural resources. This is a manifestation of indigenous local knowledge (ILK), but includes also knowledge held by those local people who may not be officially recognized as indigenous (in legal terms). Like traditional ecological knowledge, LEK can be seen as a knowledge-practice-belief complex. In other words, it is a cumulative body of knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission (Berkes, 2012). This encompasses ways of knowing and doing, which are dynamic concepts relying on building on experience and adapting to changes, thereby imbibe a strong learning-by-doing component.

Sustainable use assessment
local economies

Local economies and subsistence economies are defined as those that are small in scale and in which the use of resources (including wild species) are limited and exclusively used to meet local needs rather than accumulated or sold for profit.

Sustainable use assessment
logging

Logging is defined as the removal of whole trees or woody parts of trees from their habitat. Logging generally results in the death of the tree, but also includes cases in which it may not, such as coppicing. Logging occurs in forests that may be classified as primary, naturally regenerating, planted, and plantation. This assessment does not address logging from plantation forests except as it has bearing on the practice in the other forest types. Harvest of non-woody parts of trees ( leaves, propagules and bark) are here defined as gathering.

Sustainable use assessment
macroecology

A subfield of ecology that deals with the study of relationships between organisms and their environment at large spatial scales, and involves characterizing and explaining statistical patterns of abundance, distribution and diversity.

Global assessment (1st work programme)
mainstreaming biodiversity

Mainstreaming means integrating actions related to conservation of biodiversity into strategies relating to production sectors.

Asia-Pacific assessment
mainstreaming biodiversity

Mainstreaming, in the context of biodiversity, means integrating actions or policies related to biodiversity into broader development processes or policies such as those aimed at poverty reduction, or tackling climate change.

Americas assessment, Africa assessment, Europe and Central Asia assessment
maladaptation

A trait that is, or has become, more harmful than helpful, in contrast with an adaptation, which is more helpful than harmful (Barnett & O’Neill, 2010).

Global assessment (1st work programme)
malnutrition

Malnutrition refers to deficiencies, excesses or imbalances in a person’s intake of energy and/or nutrients. The term malnutrition covers 2 broad groups of conditions. One is ‘undernutrition’—which includes stunting (low height for age), wasting (low weight for height), underweight (low weight for age) and micronutrient deficiencies or insufficiencies (a lack of important vitamins and minerals). The other is overweight, obesity and diet-related noncommunicable diseases (such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer).

Global assessment (1st work programme), Sustainable use assessment
managed pollinator

A kind of pollinator that is maintained by human beings through husbandry (e.g. some honey bees, some leafcutting and orchard bees, some bumble bees). The terms can be broadened to include wild pollinators (q.v.) that flourish by human encouragement.

Pollination assessment
management

for the purpose of the assessment, any action taken to address the threats, risks, distribution, abundance and impacts of an invasive alien species within a defined geographic area (Hulme, 2006; Pyšek et al., 2020). Management includes prevention, preparedness, eradication, containment, and control

Invasive alien species assessment
management of wild species

The management of wild species is the management process influencing interactions among and between wild species, its habitats and humans to achieve predefined impacts valued by stakeholders. It attempts to balance the needs of wild species and the preservation of the ecosystems they inhabit with the needs of humans, using the best available sources of knowledge.

Sustainable use assessment
mangrove

Group of trees and shrubs that live in the coastal intertidal zone. Mangrove forests only grow at tropical and subtropical latitudes near the equator because they cannot withstand freezing temperatures.

Europe and Central Asia assessment, Americas assessment, Land degradation and restoration assessment, Global assessment (1st work programme), Sustainable use assessment, Asia-Pacific assessment
marginal lands

Land having limitations which in aggregate are severe for sustained application of a given use. On these lands, options are limited for diversification without the use of inputs; inappropriate management of lands may cause irreversible degradation.

Sustainable use assessment
marginal lands

Land having limitations which in aggregate are severe for sustained application of a given use. On these lands, options are limited for diversification without the use of inputs; inappropriate management of lands may cause irreversible degradation (CGIAR,.

marginal lands

Lands less suited for crop or livestock production.

Land degradation and restoration assessment
marginalization

Marginalization refers to the set of processes through which some individuals and groups face systematic disadvantages in their interactions with dominant social, political and economic institutions. The disadvantages arise from class status, social group identity (kinship, ethnicity, caste and race), political affiliation, gender, age and disability.

Global assessment (1st work programme)
marginalization

Marginalisation is a complex and multidimensional concept, which simply cannot be seen as a state of being ( a condition of low income or food insecurity) but needs to be considered a process over time with several inter-related elements interacting with social and economic conditions, political standing, and environmental health. A full understanding of the term marginalisation needs to be based on the view that the best judge of poverty and marginalisation are the people experiencing it.

Sustainable use assessment
marginalized community

Marginalized communities, peoples or populations are groups and communities that experience discrimination and exclusion (social, political and economic) because of unequal power relationships across economic, political, social and cultural dimensions (National Collaborating Centre for Determinants of Health.

Sustainable use assessment
mariculture

A branch of aquaculture involving the culture of organisms in a medium or environment which may be completely marine (sea), or sea water mixed to various degrees with fresh water, including brackishwater areas (SIVALINGAM, 1981).

Sustainable use assessment, Global assessment (1st work programme)
market failures

Refers to situations whereby the market fails to give efficient allocation of resources, due to non-fulfilment of free and competitive market structure.

Africa assessment
market forces

Refer to economic factors affecting the price of, demand for, and availability of a commodity.

Africa assessment
mass balance (analysis)

Comparison between input and output mass of materials to solve for losses such as oxidation.

Land degradation and restoration assessment
maximum sustainable yield

The maximum sustainable yield (MSY) for a given fish stock means the highest possible annual catch that can be sustained over time, by keeping the stock at the level producing maximum growth. The MSY refers to a hypothetical equilibrium state between the exploited population and the fishing activity.

Americas assessment
mean species abundance (species abundance)

An indicator of naturalness or biodiversity intactness. It is defined as the mean abundance of original species relative to their abundance in undisturbed ecosystems. An MSA (Mean Species Abundance) of 0% means a completely destructed ecosystem, with no original species remaining.

Asia-Pacific assessment
mechanistic model

see process-based model.

Scenarios and models assessment
mechanistic modelling

A model with hypothesized relationship between the variables in the dataset where the nature of the relationship is specified in terms of the biological processes that are thought to have given rise to the data.

Global assessment (1st work programme)
megadiverse countries

17 countries that harbor 70% of the species diversity of the planet. Seven such countries are in the Americas. In alphabetical order: Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, USA, Venezuela.

Americas assessment
megadiverse country

Countries (17) which have been identified as the most biodiversity-rich countries of the world, with a particular focus on endemic biodiversity (UNEP-WCMC, 2014).

Global assessment (1st work programme)
megadiverse country

Countries (17) which have been identified as the most biodiversity- rich countries of the world, with a particular focus on endemic biodiversity.

Sustainable use assessment
mesic areas

Synonym for moist areas (IUCN, 2012a).

Global assessment (1st work programme)
meta-analysis

A quantitative statistical analysis of several separate but similar experiments or studies in order to test the pooled data for statistical significance.

Europe and Central Asia assessment, Sustainable use assessment, Global assessment (1st work programme), Asia-Pacific assessment, Land degradation and restoration assessment, Americas assessment
metabolic activity

Chemical transformations that sustain life at the cell level.

Global assessment (1st work programme)
micro-habitat

The small-scale physical requirements of a particular organism or population.

Global assessment (1st work programme)
micro-plastics

Plastic debris that are less than five millimeters in length (NOAA, 2018a).

Global assessment (1st work programme)
microevolution

A change in gene frequency within a population. Evolution at this scale can be observed over short periods of time - for example, between one generation and the next, the frequency of a gene for pesticide resistance in a population of crop pests increases. Such a change might come about because natural selection favored the gene, because the population received new immigrants carrying the gene, because some nonresistant genes mutated to the resistant version, or because of random genetic drift from one generation to the next.

Global assessment (1st work programme)
micronutrients

Substances that are only needed in very small amounts but essential to organisms to produce enzymes, hormones and other substances fundamental for proper growth and development (WHO, 2015).

Global assessment (1st work programme)
micronutrients

Substances that are only needed in very small amounts but essential to organisms to produce enzymes, hormones and other substances fundamental for proper growth and development.

Sustainable use assessment
microparticles

Particles with dimensions between 0.1 and 100 micrometers, e.g. pollen, sand, dust (Vert et al., 2012).

Global assessment (1st work programme)
migration

Seasonal movement of animals from one region to another for food, breeding, etc.

Asia-Pacific assessment
millennium ecosystem assessment

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is a major assessment of the human impact on the environment published in 2005.

Land degradation and restoration assessment, Sustainable use assessment, Africa assessment, Europe and Central Asia assessment
millennium ecosystem assessment

A major assessment of the human impact on the environment published in 2005.

Americas assessment
millennium ecosystem assessment

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) is a major assessment of the human impact on the environment published in 2005.

Asia-Pacific assessment
mineral resource extraction

The removal of a mineral resource in or on the Earth’s crust, which has appropriate form, quality and quantity to allow economic extraction.

Land degradation and restoration assessment