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ABSTRACT Ecosystem services are part of a growing trend within environment and development to analyse environmental change within the context of socially valued outcomes. Yet, ecosystem services-based policies and analyses are increasingly criticized for failing to connect with, or even for restricting, development outcomes. This article seeks to connect environmental analysis with development outcomes better by applying the capability approach of Amartya Sen and others. It demonstrates how scientific analysis of ecosystem services sometimes conflates pathways of ecosystem management with development outcomes, but that it can be reconfigured to include more diverse values and objectives. The article argues that ecosystem services should be identified more as 'functionings' (in the Senian sense of valued development outcomes) rather than 'functions' (in the sense of biophysical, apolitical ecosystem properties) in order to indicate that 'services' always reflect social values, and that values and scientific explanations of underlying biophysical properties evolve together. Environmental science for socially valued outcomes such as ecosystem services is therefore an important site of political inclusion and exclusion. The article illustrates this analysis with examples of ecosystem-based adaptation to climate change from the World Bank and government of Bangladesh, and in contrast to differing approaches from the field of sustainability science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To ensure science better informs the decision-making process, researchers and policy/program managers need to understand and respect each other's way of working, culture and operational timelines. However, there is little practical guidance on how this should be done and even less documented experience with specific mechanisms that better link these two groups. The published literature on information transfer has largely emphasized the dissemination of standard packages of information to ill-defined constituencies whose needs for scientific information are not well understood. Environment Canada's National Water Research Institute, on behalf of the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, led a series of “Linking Water Science to Policy Workshops” as one such mechanism by which recent science could be delivered to practitioners, and practitioners could identify their research needs to scientists and research managers. There is a pressing need to explore and share experiences using creative mechanisms for sustained dialogue and networking between scientists and policy and program managers. The lessons learned from the workshop series and the need for science to continually inform the decision-making process has particular relevance for Canada's Ecosystem Initiatives given their integrated, place-based focus on long-term restoration and protection, and the challenge of continually changing ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article categorizes four kinds of adverse effects to human health caused by ecosystem change: direct, mediated, modulated, and systems failure. The effects are categorized on their scale, complexity, and lag-time. Some hut not all of these can be classified as resulting from reduced ecosystem services. The articles also explores the impacts that different socioeconomic-ecologic scenarios are likely to have on human health and how changes to human health may, in turn, influence the unfolding of four different plausible Future scenarios. We provide examples to show that our categorization is a useful taxonomy for understanding the complex relationships between ecosystems and human well-being and for predicting how future ecosystem changes may affect human health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scenarios can help planners and decision makers to think through uncertainties about the future and make decisions that are robust to a variety of possible outcomes. To develop useful scenarios we need to understand the main processes of relevance to the system of interest. Ecological processes, and the feedbacks that they can create between human actions and human well-being, are thought to be important for human societies. Current uncertainties over the long-term resilience of ecosystems and the substitutability of ecosystem goods and services can betranslated into three alternative realities: ecosystems may be relatively brittle, relatively resilient, or largely irrelevant. Although these extremes are only rough characterizations of reality, they help us to focus our thinking about the possible outcomes of interactions between humans and the rest of the biosphere. Existing global scenarios can be categorized into a small number of families based on shared themes and assumptions about the future. Considering the internal consistency of four of the main scenario families in relation to the three alternative ecological realities suggests that all existing scenarios make strong, implicit assumptions about the resilience of ecosystems. After a detailed discussion of individual examples, we present a synthesis of the incorporation of ecology in existing scenarios. All current scenarios are inconsistent with at least one possible property of ecosystems and their likely interaction with society. The interrelationships between ecological reality, human views of ecosystems, and social responses to actual and perceived ecological change are complex. For the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and future scenario exercises, we recommend that essential ecological assumptions should be made explicit to ensure that the details of each scenario are consistent with both the perceived and the actual degree of resilience of ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The long-range outlook for the world's ecosystems depends on the course taken by global development in the coming decades. Current global trends and ecological dynamics are consistent with very different outcomes, defined by alternative assumptions about the technological, economic, demographic, geopolitical, and social aspects of development and the ways in which institutions, personal and public values, and natural systems may be expected to respond to historically novel stressors. Recent advances in scenario analysis have addressed the dual methodological challenge of exploring these uncertainties in an organized way and determining what would be needed to make the transition to sustainability. This paper reviews global scenario research, setting current efforts in a historical context. It focuses on seven recent studies that are comprehensive, regionally disaggregated, and narratively rich—and thus of greatest relevance to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA). It summarizes their social visions and the level of quantitative detail used in these exercises. Taken together, this suite of global scenario studies provides a useful platform for the MA by offering insight into the complex factors that drive ecosystem change, estimating the magnitude of regional pressures on ecosystems, sounding the alert on critical uncertainties that could undermine sustainable development, and understanding the importance of institutions and values. But these studies are only a point of departure. The integration of changing ecosystem conditions into global development scenarios, as both effects and causes, is at the cutting edge of scenario analysis. The paper concludes by identifying directions for this research program and suggesting ways that the MA can contribute to this effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecosystem services—the benefits that people obtain from ecosystems—are essential to human existence, but demands for services often surpass the capacity of ecosystems to provide them. Lack of ecological information often precludes informed decision making about ecosystem services. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) was conceived in part to provide the necessary ecological information to decision makers. To this end, the MA set out to address the stated needs and concerns of decision makers and examine the ecological dynamics and uncertainties underlying these concerns. To improve our understanding of their information needs and concerns, we interviewed 59 decision makers from five continents. The respondents indicated that although most people generally agree about the ideal state of the planet—free of poverty and extreme inequality, replete with cultural and biological diversity-they often disagree about the best way to achieve these goals. Further, although nonspecialists are generally concerned about the environment and may have a good understanding of some of issues, they often have a more limited grasp of the ecological dynamics that drive the issues of concern. We identify some of the principal uncertainties about ecosystem dynamics and feedbacks that underlie the concerns of decision makers. Each of the papers in this special feature addresses these ecological feedbacks from the perspective of a specific discipline, suggesting ways in which knowledge of ecological dynamics can be incorporated into the MA's assessment and scenario-building process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]