With an increasing number of species threatened with extinction, a coalition of scientists is calling for the world's experts to convene an authoritative panel on diversity loss.
Leading experts from 13 countries signed a declaration, which appears in today's issue of the journal Nature, that says the biodiversity community must become more strongly integrated.
The declaration suggests that experts in the field take a cue from climate-change researchers and create an organization similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The United Nations group is widely recognized as a reliable source of information on global warming topics (related: global warming fast facts).
"For the sake of the planet, the biodiversity science community has to create a way to get organized," one of the authors, Robert Watson, said in a statement.
Watson is chief scientist at the World Bank Environment Department and a former chair of the IPCC.
The community should, with "one clear voice, advise governments on steps to halt the potentially catastrophic loss of species already occurring," he said.
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Harold Mooney, a professor of environmental biology at Stanford University in California, also signed the declaration.
"Loss of biodiversity is a crisis that scientists have been trying to bring to the attention of the general public for quite a while," he said.
But the public, Mooney tells National Geographic News, isn't getting the message.
What is needed, he says, is an international scientific body that can identify what is known and what is uncertain and can authoritatively tell people what it all means.
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