NAS, AAAS, and Others Celebrate Darwin with "Twenty-First Century Ecosystems"

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Board on International Scientific Organizations, and the Academy's U.S. National Committee for DIVERSITAS convened a two-day symposium at AAAS to explore biodiversity, ecosystems, and the challenges of the 21st century.

The symposium—"Twenty-first Century Ecosystems: Systemic Risk and the Public Good"—featured a remarkable array of scientists, policy experts, and journalists from around the world. On 11 and 12 February, they discussed both the way that policies can put ecosystems at risk and the opportunities for designing policies that make use of and strengthen biodiversity and ecosystem services.

You can watch archived video of the symposium.

And you can see the event's full agenda.

Speakers included Sir Peter Crane of the University of Chicago; Cristián Samper, director of the U.S. National Museum of Natural History; Steve Schneider of Stanford University; Michael Donoghue, a vice president at Yale University; Achim Steiner, director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP); Yadvinder Mahli of Oxford University; Bruce Babbitt, former U.S. Secretary of the Interior and governor of Arizona; Thomas E. Lovejoy, former president of The Heinz Center; James Collins, assistant director of biological sciences at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF); and Andrew Revkin, an environmental reporter for the New York Times.

The event was co-sponsored by NSF; the U.S. Geological Survey; the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Defenders of Wildlife; the Smithsonian Institution; and the AAAS Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy.

27 February 2009