Advisory Board

Dr. Didier Babin is a French-Canadian researcher at CIRAD (France) in the UMR Tétis “Territories, Environment, Remote Sensing, and Spatial Information.”

 

He is a member of the French National Committee on Biodiversity, a scientific member of the advisory committee of the European partnership Biodiversa+ since 2022, and a member of the Biosefair research meta-program of INRAE since 2023. He co-chairs the “Biodiversity and Decision-Making and Action Strategies” Working Group within Orée Enterprises and Biodiversity. He is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Environmental Sciences at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) and was the initiator of the “Copernicea” project – “Regional Cooperation for New Ecosystem Accounting Indicators in Africa” – under the Sahara-Sahel Observatory.

 

He was recently the Team Leader and then Senior Strategic Scientific Advisor for the “Post 2020 Biodiversity Framework EU Support” project for Expertise France. He served as the National Focal Point of the Scientific Body of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) for 8 years and was the Senior Program Officer responsible for the “Biodiversity for Development and Poverty Eradication” program at the CBD Secretariat in Montreal for 5 years.

He contributed to the establishment of IPBES and chaired the International Coordination Council of the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Program from 2016 to 2018. He has been the President of MAB-France, the French network of Biosphere Reserves, since 2014 and represents France on the International Coordination Council of the UNESCO MAB Program. He was also a member of the international drafting team for the Hangzhou 2026-2035 Strategic Action Plan for this intergovernmental scientific program.

András Báldi is a member of the Biodiversa+ Partnership Advisory Board, which he chaired between 2022 and 2025. He leads the Ecosystem Services Research Group at the Centre for Ecological Research in Hungary. The group’s research focuses on biodiversity and ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes, with particular emphasis on pollination, conservation biological pest control, and ecological intensification based on these services.

 

András Báldi has published in leading journals, including Science, Nature Communications, Proceedings of the Royal Society, and Trends in Ecology & Evolution (TREE). His H-index is 47, with more than 11,000 citations (Web of Science). He has led multiple project teams, including EU FP5, FP7, H2020, and Horizon Europe projects, as well as interdisciplinary initiatives such as the Environmental Horizon Scanning – Hungary 2050 program. He has a longstanding interest in the science-policy interface. He served as a lead expert and author in the first IPBES work programme, and as a member of the IPBES Knowledge and Data Task Force. Currently, he chairs the Environment Steering Panel of the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (EASAC), leads the Ecology and Evolution Section of Academia Europaea, and is a former president of the Society for Conservation Biology – Europe. Through his leadership roles in prominent international and Hungarian scientific societies, András Báldi has built an extensive international network and remains an active contributor to scientific life.

Hilde Eggermont is a freshwater biologist (PhD, 2004). After eight years of postdoctoral research at Ghent University on paleolimnology in African lakes, she turned her focus to the political dimensions of nature conservation and the role of science in shaping policy and decision-making.

 

In 2012, she became Coordinator of the Belgian Biodiversity Platform, a national science-policy interface for biodiversity supported by the Belgian Federal Government. From 2012 to 2023, she also acted as Belgian Focal Point for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Over the same period, she was closely involved in Biodiversa and served as Chair and Coordinator of the European Biodiversity Partnership (Biodiversa+) between 2019 and 2023.

 

Hilde has also taken on several volunteer roles in international science-based organisations, including serving as Vice President of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN, 2016–2025). She currently sits on the Board of the Future for Nature Foundation, which supports and spotlights young conservationists worldwide by providing funding, visibility, and networks to strengthen their impact.

Since November 2023, Hilde has been Director General of the Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO), an independent Flemish research institute supporting the preparation, implementation and evaluation of biodiversity policy with science and data. Her daily work focuses on bridging science, policy, and practice for biodiversity conservation across scales, with international engagements in conventions such as Ramsar and the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS).

Jerneja Penca is a Senior Research Associate at the Science and Research Centre Koper, Slovenia, where she heads Mediterranean Institute for Environmental Studies – a transdisciplinary research department. Her work focuses on governance for sustainability in marine and terrestrial systems, linking knowledge about how these systems work with transformation for sustainability from local to global scales. In this role, she leads research teams (funded by Horizon Europe, Mission Ocean, COST and national funder), she serves as a reliable project partner, she teaches and supervises at the postgraduate level and she’s an Editor for the journal Sustainability Science. She actively connects civil, expert and increasingly arts communities with global scientific knowledge production through peer review and outreach. She is particularly dedicated to shaping a productive science-policy interface, having recently served on the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment, the MedECCC Water-Food-Energy Nexus Assessment, and the (Towards) International Panel for Ocean Sustainability.

Henrik Smith is a member of the Biodiversa+ Partnership’s Advisory Board. He is a Professor of Animal Ecology at Lund University, where he leads a research group focusing on how human land use in production landscapes affects biodiversity and how resulting changes in biodiversity feed back on ecosystem services. He has been engaged in multidisciplinary work to understand how alternative policies, including subsidies and market-based instruments, can be used to conserve and harness biodiversity as an asset. He has led large national interdisciplinary projects, an FP7-RURAGRI ERA-NET project, and participated in multiple European research projects.

 

Professor Smith has published more than 280 peer-reviewed papers, including in leading journals such as Nature, Science, Nature Communications, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ecology Letters, Biological Reviews, and Proceedings of the Royal Society B. He has a strong track record in developing and leading platforms that foster cross-disciplinary research, science-policy interactions, and outreach. He was the founding coordinator of the “Centre for Environmental Science” at Lund University (2010–2020), the Strategic Research Area “Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services” at Lund and Gothenburg Universities (2010–2024), and the “Profile Area Nature-based Future Solutions” at Lund University (2023-present). He has also made significant contributions to stakeholder dialogue, both as an expert, including as a member of the Swedish Climate Policy Council, and through commissioned reports for public authorities.

Alice Vadrot has been Professor of International Relations and Environment at the University of Vienna since March 2025, focusing on the role of knowledge at the science–policy interface in international environmental diplomacy. She received an ERC Starting Grant for her project MARIPOLDATA (2018–2024), which mapped marine biodiversity negotiations and is part of the EU consortium of the project MARCO-BOLO (2022–2026) analyzing biodiversity data needs. In 2023 she was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant for the project TwinPolitics investigating the development and use of digital ocean twins in multilateral negotiation contexts.

 

Alice Vadrot is a member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), vice Chair of the ÖAW Commission Biodiversity in Austria and part of the managing board of the Austrian Biodiversity Council and the ECH. She leads Biodiversity Austria- International, serves on several national and European advisory boards, and has been honored with the Figdor Award of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Henrik-Enderlein-Prize for excellence in social science research.