International Biodiversity Congress (IBC-2026)

The natural ecosystems that sustain life on Earth know no political boundaries. Forests stretch across nations, oceans link distant shores, and migratory species traverse continents in their life cycles. Biodiversity underpins the stability of life on Earth, sustaining ecosystems that provide essential services such as food security, climate regulation, water purification, soil fertility, and cultural well-being. The accelerating pace of environmental change—driven by climate variability, land-use transformation, biological invasions, pollution, and overexploitation—has placed unprecedented pressure on biodiversity across terrestrial, freshwater, coastal, and marine systems.

Recent global assessments underscore a stark reality: biodiversity is declining at rates unprecedented in human history. The loss of biodiversity compromises ecosystem functions such as productivity, nutrient cycling, pollination, soil fertility and trophic regulation. As ecosystems lose functional redundancy, their capacity to absorb shocks reduces, increasing the likelihood of abrupt regime shifts. Such changes threaten livelihoods, food systems, and cultural heritage, particularly for communities that depend directly on natural resources. In response to these compounding stressors, the concept of ecosystem resilience has emerged as a central organizing principle for biodiversity science, conservation practice, and policy. In a rapidly changing world, ecosystem resilience offers a lens to reconcile conservation and development objectives. It encourages proactive strategies—such as maintaining landscape connectivity, conserving functional diversity, restoring degraded systems, and aligning governance with ecological scales—to enhance adaptive capacity of ecosystems to resist disturbances, recover from perturbations, and reorganize while maintaining its core biological diversity, structure, functions and feedbacks.

Despite advances in biodiversity science, a persistent gap remains between knowledge generation and implementation. Emerging technologies—ranging from Earth observation
and artificial intelligence to genomics and bioacoustics—offer unprecedented opportunities to bridge this gap. Emerging technologies play a transformative role in advancing biodiversity sustainability by enabling more accurate, timely, and scalable approaches to understanding, conserving, and restoring ecosystems. Innovations such as remote sensing, artificial intelligence, environmental DNA (eDNA), bioacoustics, and sensor networks have revolutionized biodiversity monitoring by allowing continuous, non-invasive, and high- resolution observation of species, habitats, and ecological processes across landscapes and seascapes. Machine learning and big-data analytics facilitate the integration of complex.

ecological, climatic, and socio-environmental datasets, supporting predictive modelling, early-warning systems, and adaptive management under changing environmental
conditions. Digital platforms and citizen science applications facilitate biodiversity data collection and decision-making, fostering inclusive stewardship and awareness. When coupled with participatory governance and ethical frameworks, these tools can support evidence-based decision-making at local to global scales.

International Biodiversity Congress (IBC) 2026 seeks to bring together researchers, academicians, conservationists, industry partners, social scientists, economists,
policymakers, practitioners and indigenous knowledge-holders to discuss the current strategies and future directions to conserve, sustainably use and equitably share biodiversity by leveraging on novel technologies to foster ecosystem resilience across diverse landscapes. The objectives of IBC 2026 are:

• To synthesize advances in biodiversity and ecosystem resilience
• To showcase technological innovations that enable scalable solutions
• To foster cross-sector partnerships
• To support capacity building and knowledge exchange
• To inform policies aligned with global biodiversity and climate targets

Participation:

Members of academic and research community, civil society, community members, practitioners, policymakers, corporates, etc.