Announcing the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Posting has been very light recently while I work off some backlog. Thanks for your patience, and I’ll be back to a more reasonable frequency soon. Until then, check out the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report, released yesterday.

The MEA report presents the results from a five-year research effort by 1,360 of the world’s leading scientists. It documents the role of healthy and diverse ecosystems for providing numerous services clean water, food, a stable climate, and much more. The report’s findings are that approximately 60 percent of the ecosystem services that support life on Earth – watersheds, forests, fisheries – are being degraded or used unsustainably. Scientists warn that the harmful consequences of this degradation could grow significantly worse in the next 50 years.

In response to the MEA’s findings, eight of the world’s leading international conservation organizations – Birdlife International, Conservation International, IUCN-The World Conservation Union, Fauna & Flora International, the Nature Conservancy, Wetlands International, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) – have pledged to work together to conserve ecosystems for the improvement of human well-being. There’s nothing surprising in this group endorsing ecosystem protection. I think we can all be impressed when the Chamber of Commerce signs on.

The Ecological Society of America has published an issues paper, Ecosystem Services: Benefits Supplied to Human Societies by Natural Ecosystems (Issue 2, available here) that contains a very readable summary about ecosystem services. You also can find here the paper published in Nature in 1997 by Robert Costanza which concluded that the value of global ecosystem services reduced to dollars ($33 trillion) exceeded the value of the global gross national products ($18 trillion).

See you in a few days. I haven’t cracked open the MEA report, but will be posting something about it soon. Thanks to Bob Whitson for the tip.