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作者：Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
出版地：Washington, DC USA
出版社：Island Press
出版时间：2005年1月
ISBN：1-59726-040-1

内容摘要：

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was called for by United Nations Secretary-General Koffi Annan in 2000 in his report to the UN General Assembly, We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century. Governments subsequently supported the establishment of the assessment through decisions taken by three international conventions, and the MA was initiated in 2001. The MA was conducted under the auspices of the United Nations, with the secretariat coordinated by the United Nations Environment Programme, and it was governed by a multistakeholder board that included representatives of international institutions, governments, business, NGOs, and indigenous peoples. The objective of the MA was to assess the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and to establish the scientific basis for actions needed to enhance the conservation and sustainable use of ecosystems and their contributions to human well-being. This report presents a synthesis and integration of the findings of the four MA Working Groups (Condition and Trends, Scenarios, Responses, and Sub-global Assessments). It does not, however, provide a comprehensive summary of each Working Group report, and readers are encouraged to also review the findings of these separately. This synthesis is organized around the core questions originally posed to the assessment: How have ecosystems and their services changed? What has caused these changes? How have these changes affected human well-being? How might ecosystems change in the future and what are the implications for human well-being? And what options exist to enhance the conservation of ecosystems and their contribution to human well-being?

原文摘录：

1. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was carried out between 2001 and 2005 to assess the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and to establish the scientific basis for actions needed to enhance the conservation and sustainable use of ecosystems and their contributions to human well-being.
2. Ecosystem services are the benefits people obtain from ecosystems. These include provisioning services such as food, water, timber, and fiber; regulating services that affect climate, floods, disease, wastes, and water quality; cultural services that provide recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual benefits; and supporting services such as soil formation, photosynthesis, and nutrient cycling.
3. Human well-being is assumed to have multiple constituents, including the basic material for a good life, such as secure and adequate livelihoods, enough food at all times, shelter, clothing, and access to goods; health, including feeling well and having a healthy physical environment, such as clean air and access to clean water; good social relations, including social cohesion, mutual respect, and the ability to help others and provide for children; security, including secure access to natural and other resources, personal safety, and security from natural and human-made disasters; and freedom of choice and action, including the opportunity to achieve what an individual values doing and being.

1. Five overarching questions, along with more detailed lists of user needs developed through discussions with stakeholders or provided by governments through international conventions, guided the issues that were assessed:
   1. What are the current condition and trends of ecosystems, ecosystem services, and human well-being?
   2. What are plausible future changes in ecosystems and their ecosystem services and the consequent changes in human well-being?
   3. What can be done to enhance well-being and conserve ecosystems? What are the strengths and weaknesses of response options that can be considered to realize or avoid specific futures?
   4. What are the key uncertainties that hinder effective decision-making concerning ecosystems?
   5. What tools and methodologies developed and used in the MA can strengthen capacity to assess ecosystems, the services they provide, their impacts on human well-being, and the strengths and weaknesses of response options?
2. The degradation of ecosystem services could grow significantly worse during the first half of this century and is a barrier to achieving the Millennium Development Goals.
3. The harmful effects of the degradation of ecosystem services (the persistent decrease in the capacity of an ecosystem to deliver services) are being borne disproportionately by the poor, are contributing to growing inequities and disparities across groups of people, and are sometimes the principal factor causing poverty and social conflict.
4. Past actions to slow or reverse the degradation of ecosystems have yielded significant benefits, but these improvements have generally not kept pace with growing pressures and demands.
5. Humans are fundamentally, and to a significant extent irreversibly, changing the diversity of life on Earth, and most of these changes represent a loss of biodiversity.
6. The growing demand for these ecosystem services was met both by consuming an increasing fraction of the available supply (for example, diverting more water for irrigation or capturing more fish from the sea) and by raising the production of some services, such as crops and livestock.
7. The changes that have been made to ecosystems have contributed to substantial net gains in human well-being and economic development, but these gains have been achieved at growing costs in the form of the degradation of many ecosystem services, increased risks of nonlinear changes, and the exacerbation of poverty for some groups of people. These problems, unless addressed, will substantially diminish the benefits that future generations obtain from ecosystems.
8. Ecosystem services that have been degraded over the past 50 years include capture fisheries, water supply, waste treatment and detoxification, water purification, natural hazard protection, regulation of air quality, regulation of regional and local climate, regulation of erosion, spiritual fulfillment, and aesthetic enjoyment.
9. Actions to increase one ecosystem service often cause the degradation of other services.
10. The degradation of ecosystem services often causes significant harm to human well-being.
11. Many ecosystem services have not been monitored, and it is also difficult to estimate the influence of changes in ecosystem services relative to other social, cultural, and economic factors that also affect human well-being.
12. Most resource management decisions are most strongly influenced by ecosystem services entering markets; as a result, the nonmarketed benefits are often lost or degraded. These nonmarketed benefits are often high and sometimes more valuable than the marketed ones.
13. The total economic value associated with managing ecosystems more sustainably is often higher than the value associated with the conversion of the ecosystem through farming, clear-cut logging, or other intensive uses.

1. The impact of the loss of cultural services is particularly difficult to measure, but it is especially important for many people. Human cultures, knowledge systems, religions, and social interactions have been strongly influenced by ecosystems. A number of the MA sub-global assessments found that spiritual and cultural values of ecosystems were as important as other services for many local communities, both in developing countries (the importance of sacred groves of forest in India, for example) and industrial ones (the importance of urban parks, for instance).
2. While degradation of some services may sometimes be warranted to produce a greater gain in other services, often more degradation of ecosystem services takes place than is in society’s interests because many of the services degraded are “public goods.”
3. Wealthy populations cannot be insulated from the degradation of ecosystem services.
4. It is difficult to assess the implications of ecosystem changes and to manage ecosystems effectively because many of the effects are slow to become apparent, because they may be expressed primarily at some distance from where the ecosystem was changed, and because the costs and benefits of changes often accrue to different sets of stakeholders.
5. Substantial inertia (delay in the response of a system to a disturbance) exists in ecological systems.
6. Despite the progress achieved in increasing the production and use of some ecosystem services, levels of poverty remain high, inequities are growing, and many people still do not have a sufficient supply of or access to ecosystem services.
7. Inequality in income and other measures of human wellbeing has increased over the past decade. A child born in sub-Saharan Africa is 20 times more likely to die before age 5 than a child born in an industrial country, and this disparity is higher than it was a decade ago. During the 1990s, 21 countries experienced declines in their rankings in the Human Development Index (an aggregate measure of economic well-being, health, and education); 14 of them were in sub-Saharan Africa.
8. The degradation of ecosystem services is harming many of the world’s poorest people and is sometimes the principal factor causing poverty.
9. The pattern of “winners” and “losers” associated with ecosystem changes—and in particular the impact of ecosystem changes on poor people, women, and indigenous peoples—has not been adequately taken into account in management decisions.
10. The reliance of the rural poor on ecosystem services is rarely measured and thus typically overlooked in national statistics and poverty assessments, resulting in inappropriate strategies that do not take into account the role of the environment in poverty reduction.
11. The eight Millennium Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2000 aim to improve human well-being by reducing poverty, hunger, child and maternal mortality, by ensuring education for all, by controlling and managing diseases, by tackling gender disparity, by ensuring environmental sustainability, and by pursuing global partnerships. Under each of the MDGs, countries have agreed to targets to be achieved by 2015. Many of the regions facing the greatest challenges in achieving these targets coincide with regions facing the greatest problems of ecosystem degradation.
12. Three of the four MA scenarios show that significant changes in policies, institutions, and practices can mitigate many of the negative consequences of growing pressures on ecosystems, although the changes required are large and not currently under way.
13. The scale of interventions that result in these positive outcomes are substantial and include significant investments in environmentally sound technology, active adaptive management, proactive action to address environmental problems before their full consequences are experienced, major investments in public goods (such as education and health), strong action to reduce socioeconomic disparities and eliminate poverty, and expanded capacity of people to manage ecosystems adaptively. However, even in scenarios where one or more categories of ecosystem services improve, biodiversity continues to be lost and thus the long-term sustainability of actions to mitigate degradation of ecosystem services is uncertain.
14. Past actions to slow or reverse the degradation of ecosystems have yielded significant benefits, but these improvements have generally not kept pace with growing pressures and demands.
15. Ecosystem degradation can rarely be reversed without actions that address the negative effects or enhance the positive effects of one or more of the five indirect drivers of change: population change (including growth and migration), change in economic activity (including economic growth, disparities in wealth, and trade patterns), sociopolitical factors (including factors ranging from the presence of conflict to public participation in decision- making), cultural factors, and technological change.
16. An effective set of responses to ensure the sustainable management of ecosystems must address the indirect and drivers just described and must overcome barriers related to:
    1. Inappropriate institutional and governance arrangements, including the presence of corruption and weak systems of regulation and accountability.
    2. Market failures and the misalignment of economic incentives.
    3. Social and behavioral factors, including the lack of political and economic power of some groups (such as poor people, women, and indigenous peoples) that are particularly dependent on ecosystem services or harmed by their degradation.
    4. Underinvestment in the development and diffusion of technologies that could increase the efficiency of use of ecosystem services and could reduce the harmful impacts of various drivers of ecosystem change.
    5. Insufficient knowledge (as well as the poor use of existing knowledge) concerning ecosystem services and management, policy, technological, behavioral, and institutional responses that could enhance benefits from these services while conserving resources.
17. The MA assessed 74 response options for ecosystem services, integrated ecosystem management, conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, and climate change. Many of these options hold significant promise for overcoming these barriers and conserving or sustainably enhancing the supply of ecosystem services.
18. Changes in institutional and environmental governance frameworks are sometimes required to create the enabling conditions for effective management of ecosystems, while in other cases existing institutions could meet these needs but face significant barriers.
19. Social and behavioral responses—including population policy, public education, civil society actions, and empowerment of communities, women, and youth—can be instrumental in responding to the problem of ecosystem degradation.
20. Measures to reduce aggregate consumption of unsustainably managed ecosystem services. The choices about what individuals consume and how much are influenced not just by considerations of price but also by behavioral factors related to culture, ethics, and values. Behavioral changes that could reduce demand for degraded ecosystem services can be encouraged through actions by governments (such as education and public awareness programs or the promotion of demand-side management), industry (commitments to use raw materials that are from sources certified as being sustainable, for example, or improved product labeling), and civil society (through raising public awareness). Efforts to reduce aggregate consumption, however, must sometimes incorporate measures to increase the access to and consumption of those same ecosystem services by specific groups such as poor people.
21. Empowerment of groups particularly dependent on ecosystem services or affected by their degradation, including women, indigenous peoples, and young people. Despite women’s knowledge about the environment and the potential they possess, their participation in decision-making has often been restricted by economic, social, and cultural structures. Young people are also key stakeholders in that they will experience the longer-term consequences of decisions made today concerning ecosystem services. Indigenous control of traditional homelands can sometimes have environmental benefits, although the primary justification continues to be based on human and cultural rights.
22. Given the growing demands for ecosystem services and other increased pressures on ecosystems, the development and diffusion of technologies designed to increase the efficiency of resource use or reduce the impacts of drivers such as climate change and nutrient loading are essential.
23. Effective management of ecosystems is constrained both by the lack of knowledge and information about different aspects of ecosystems and by the failure to use adequately the information that does exist in support of management decisions.
24. Models used to project future environmental and economic conditions have limited capability of incorporating ecological “feedbacks,” including nonlinear changes in ecosystems, as well as behavioral feedbacks such as learning that may take place through adaptive management of ecosystems.
25. Effective management of ecosystems typically requires “place-based” knowledge—that is, information about the specific characteristics and history of an ecosystem. Traditional knowledge or practitioners’ knowledge held by local resource managers can often be of considerable value in resource management, but it is too rarely incorporated into decision-making processes and indeed is often inappropriately dismissed.
26. A variety of frameworks and methods can be used to make better decisions in the face of uncertainties in data, prediction, context, and scale. Active adaptive management can be a particularly valuable tool for reducing uncertainty about ecosystem management decisions.
27. Scenarios also provide one means to cope with many aspects of uncertainty, but our limited understanding of ecological systems and human responses shrouds any individual scenario in its own characteristic uncertainty.
28. In other cases, the assessment revealed significant needs for further research, such the need to improve understanding of nonlinear changes in ecosystems and of the economic value of alternative management options. Investments in improved monitoring and research, combined with additional assessments of ecosystem services in different nations and regions, would significantly enhance the utility of any future global assessment of the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being.
29. Urban systems are built environments with a high human density. For mapping purposes, the MA uses known human settlements with a population of 5,000 or more, with boundaries delineated by observing persistent night-time lights or by inferring areal extent in the cases where such observations are absent.
30. Ecosystem services are the benefits provided by ecosystems. These include provisioning services such as food, water, timber, fiber, and genetic resources; regulating services such as the regulation of climate, floods, disease, and water quality as well as waste treatment; cultural services such as recreation, aesthetic enjoyment, and spiritual fulfillment; and supporting services such as soil formation, pollination, and nutrient cycling.
31. Human use of all ecosystem services is growing rapidly. Approximately 60% (15 out of 24) of the ecosystem services evaluated in this assessment (including 70% of regulating and cultural services) are being degraded or used unsustainably.
32. Provisioning Services: The quantity of provisioning ecosystem services such as food, water, and timber used by humans increased rapidly, often more rapidly than population growth although generally slower than economic growth, during the second half of the twentieth century. And it continues to grow. In a number of cases, provisioning services are being used at unsustainable rates.
33. Regulating Services: Humans have substantially altered regulating services such as disease and climate regulation by modifying the ecosystem providing the service and, in the case of waste processing services, by exceeding the capabilities of ecosystems to provide the service.
34. Cultural Services
    1. These are the nonmaterial benefits people obtain from ecosystems through spiritual enrichment, cognitive development, reflection, recreation, and aesthetic experiences, including:
    2. Cultural diversity. The diversity of ecosystems is one factor influencing the diversity of cultures.
    3. Spiritual and religious values. Many religions attach spiritual and religious values to ecosystems or their components.
    4. Knowledge systems (traditional and formal). Ecosystems influence the types of knowledge systems developed by different cultures.
    5. Educational values. Ecosystems and their components and processes provide the basis for both formal and informal education in many societies.
    6. Inspiration. Ecosystems provide a rich source of inspiration for art, folklore, national symbols, architecture, and advertising.
    7. Aesthetic values. Many people find beauty or aesthetic value in various aspects of ecosystems, as reflected in the support for parks, scenic drives, and the selection of housing locations.
    8. Social relations. Ecosystems influence the types of social relations that are established in particular cultures. Fishing societies, for example, differ in many respects in their social relations from nomadic herding or agricultural societies.
    9. Sense of place. Many people value the “sense of place” that is associated with recognized features of their environment, including aspects of the ecosystem.
    10. Cultural heritage values. Many societies place high value on the maintenance of either historically important landscapes (“cultural landscapes”) or culturally significant species.
    11. Recreation and ecotourism. People often choose where to spend their leisure time based in part on the characteristics of the natural or cultivated landscapes in a particular area.

1. Cultural Services: Although the use of cultural services has continued to grow, the capability of ecosystems to provide cultural benefits has been significantly diminished in the past century (C17). Human cultures are strongly influenced by ecosystems, and ecosystem change can have a significant impact on cultural identity and social stability. Human cultures, knowledge systems, religions, heritage values, social interactions, and the linked amenity services (such as aesthetic enjoyment, recreation, artistic and spiritual fulfillment, and intellectual development) have always been influenced and shaped by the nature of the ecosystem and ecosystem conditions. Many of these benefits are being degraded, either through changes to ecosystems (a recent rapid decline in the numbers of sacred groves and other such protected areas, for example) or through societal changes (such as the loss of languages or of traditional knowledge) that reduce people’s recognition or appreciation of those cultural benefits. Rapid loss of culturally valued ecosystems and landscapes can contribute to social disruptions and societal marginalization. And there has been a decline in the quantity and quality of aesthetically pleasing natural landscapes.
2. Although human demand for ecosystem services continues to grow in the aggregate, the demand for particular services in specific regions is declining as substitutes are developed.
3. The net benefits gained through actions to increase the productivity or harvest of ecosystem services have been less than initially believed after taking into account negative trade-offs.
4. Negative trade-offs are commonly found between individual provisioning services and between provisioning services and the combined regulating, cultural, and supporting services and biodiversity.
5. Changes in ecosystem services influence all components of human well-being, including the basic material needs for a good life, health, good social relations, security, and freedom of choice and action (CF3).
6. These factors mediate the relationship between ecosystem services and human well-being in ways that remain contested and incompletely understood. The relationship between human wellbeing and ecosystem services is not linear. When an ecosystem service is abundant relative to the demand, a marginal increase in ecosystem services generally contributes only slightly to human well-being (or may even diminish it). But when the service is relatively scarce, a small decrease can substantially reduce human well-being (S.SDM, SG3.4).
7. Ecosystem services contribute significantly to global employment and economic activity.
8. The degradation of ecosystem services often causes significant harm to human well-being (C5 Box 5.2). The information available to assess the consequences of changes in ecosystem services for human well-being is relatively limited. Many ecosystem services have not been monitored and it is also difficult to estimate the relative influence of changes in ecosystem services in relation to other social, cultural, and economic factors that also affect human well-being. Nevertheless, the following evidence demonstrates that the harmful effects of the degradation of ecosystem services on livelihoods, health, and local and national economies are substantial.
9. Human well-being has five main components: the basic material needs for a good life, health, good social relations, security, and freedom of choice and action.
10. Human well-being is a continuum—from extreme deprivation, or poverty, to a high attainment or experience of wellbeing. Ecosystems underpin human well-being through supporting, provisioning, regulating, and cultural services. Well-being also depends on the supply and quality of human services, technology, and institutions.

1. Changes in cultural services can have a strong influence on social relations, particularly in cultures that have retained strong connections to local environments.
2. There are clear examples of declining ecosystem services disrupting social relations or resulting in conflicts. Indigenous societies whose cultural identities are tied closely to particular habitats or wildlife suffer if habitats are destroyed or wildlife populations decline.
3. Freedom of choice and action refers to the ability of individuals to control what happens to them and to be able to achieve what they value doing or being.
4. Degradation of ecosystem services exacerbates poverty in developing countries, which can affect neighboring industrial countries by slowing regional economic growth and contributing to the outbreak of conflicts or the migration of refugees.
5. Changes in ecosystem services affect people living in urban ecosystems both directly and indirectly. Likewise, urban populations have strong impacts on ecosystem services both in the local vicinity and at considerable distances from urban centers.
6. Spiritual and cultural values of ecosystems are as important as other services for many local communities. Human cultures, knowledge systems, religions, heritage values, and social interactions have always been influenced and shaped by the nature of the ecosystem and ecosystem conditions in which culture is based. People have benefited in many ways from cultural ecosystem services, including aesthetic enjoyment, recreation, artistic and spiritual fulfillment, and intellectual development (C17.ES). Several of the MA sub-global assessments highlighted the importance of these cultural services and spiritual benefits to local communities (SG.SDM). For example, local villages in India preserve selected sacred groves of forest for spiritual reasons, and urban parks provide important cultural and recreational services in cities around the world.
7. Despite the progress achieved in increasing the production and use of some ecosystem services, levels of poverty remain high, inequities are growing, and many people still do not have a sufficient supply of or access to ecosystem services (C5).
8. Poor people have historically lost access to ecosystem services disproportionately as demand for those services has grown.
9. In the aggregate and at a global scale, there are five indirect drivers of changes in ecosystems and their services: population change, change in economic activity, sociopolitical factors, cultural factors, and technological change.
10. Sociopolitical Drivers: Sociopolitical drivers encompass the forces influencing decision-making and include the quantity of public participation in decision-making, the groups participating in public decision-making, the mechanisms of dispute resolution, the role of the state relative to the private sector, and levels of education and knowledge (S7.2.3).
11. Cultural and Religious Drivers: To understand culture as a driver of ecosystem change, it is most useful to think of it as the values, beliefs, and norms that a group of people share. In this sense, culture conditions individuals’ perceptions of the world, influences what they consider important, and suggests what courses of action are appropriate and inappropriate (S7.2.4). Broad comparisons of whole cultures have not proved useful because they ignore vast variations in values, beliefs, and norms within cultures. Nevertheless, cultural differences clearly have important impacts on direct drivers. Cultural factors, for example, can influence consumption behavior (what and how much people consume) and values related to environmental stewardship, and they may be particularly important drivers of environmental change.
12. Urban demographic and economic growth has been increasing pressures on ecosystems globally, but affluent rural and suburban living often places even more pressure on ecosystems.
13. Other drivers (such as economic growth and rates of technological change), ecosystem services (particularly supporting and cultural services such as soil formation and recreational opportunities), and human well-being indicators (such as human health and social relations) were estimated qualitatively.

1. Habitat loss in terrestrial environments is projected to accelerate decline in local diversity of native species in all four scenarios by 2050 (high certainty) (S.SDM). Loss of habitat results in the immediate extirpation of local populations and the loss of the services that these populations provided.
2. The habitat losses projected in the MA scenarios will lead to global extinctions as numbers of species approach equilibrium with the remnant habitat (high certainty) (S.SDM, S10.ES).
3. In three of the four MA scenarios, ecosystem services show net improvements in at least one of the three categories of provisioning, regulating, and cultural services.
4. The assessments identified inequities in the distribution of the costs and benefits of ecosystem change, which are often displaced to other places or future generations (SG.SDM).
5. Failure to acknowledge that stakeholders at different scales perceive different values in various ecosystem services can lead to unworkable and inequitable policies or programs at all scales (SGWG). Ecosystem services that are of considerable importance at global scales, such as carbon sequestration or waste regulation, are not necessarily seen to be of value locally. Similarly, services of local importance, such as the cultural benefits of ecosystems, the availability of manure for fuel and fertilizer, or the presence of non-wood forest products, are often not seen as important globally. Responses designed to achieve goals related to global or regional concerns are likely to fail unless they take into account the different values and concerns motivating local communities.
6. Integrated assessments of ecosystems and human well-being need to be adapted to the specific needs and characteristics of the groups undertaking the assessment (SG.SDM, SG11.ES).
7. Developing the local conceptual framework from a base of local concepts and principles, as opposed to simply translating the MA framework into local terms, has allowed local communities to take ownership of their assessment process and given them the power both to assess the local environment and human populations using their own knowledge and principles of well-being and to seek responses to problems within their own cultural and spiritual institutions.
8. Many impacts of humans on ecosystems (both harmful and beneficial) are slow to become apparent; this can result in the costs associated with ecosystem changes being deferred to future generations.
9. Different categories of ecosystem services tend to change over different time scales, making it difficult for managers to evaluate trade-offs fully.
10. Significant inertia exists in the process of species extinctions that result from habitat loss; even if habitat loss were to end today, it would take hundreds of years for species numbers to reach a new and lower equilibrium due to the habitat changes that have taken place in the last centuries (S10).
11. There is established but incomplete evidence that changes being made in ecosystems are increasing the likelihood of nonlinear and potentially high-impact, abrupt changes in physical and biological systems that have important consequences for human well-being (C6, S3, S13.4, S.SDM).
12. It is a major challenge to reverse the degradation of ecosystems while meeting increasing demands for their services. But this challenge can be met. Three of the four MA scenarios show that changes in policies, institutions, and practices can mitigate some of the negative consequences of growing pressures on ecosystems, although the changes required are large and not currently under way (S.SDM).
13. Social and behavioral factors, including the lack of political and economic power of some groups (such as poor people, women, and indigenous groups) who are particularly dependent on ecosystem services or harmed by their degradation;
14. Changes in institutional and environmental governance frameworks are sometimes required in order to create the enabling conditions for effective management of ecosystems, while in other cases existing institutions could meet these needs but face significant barriers.
15. Empowerment of groups particularly dependent on ecosystem services or affected by their degradation, including women, indigenous people, and young people (G, B, N) (RWG). Despite women’s knowledge about the environment and the potential they possess, their participation in decision-making has often been restricted by social and cultural structures. Young people are key stakeholders in that they will experience the longer-term consequences of decisions made today concerning ecosystem services. Indigenous control of traditional homelands can sometimes have environmental benefits, although the primary justification continues to be based on human and cultural rights.
16. Use of all relevant forms of knowledge and information in assessments and decision-making, including traditional and practitioners’ knowledge (G, B, N) (RWG, C17.ES). Effective management of ecosystems typically requires “place-based” knowledge—information about the specific characteristics and history of an ecosystem. Formal scientific information is often one source of such information, but traditional knowledge or practitioners’ knowledge held by local resource managers can be of equal or greater value. While that knowledge is used in the decisions taken by those who have it, it is too rarely incorporated into other decision-making processes and is often inappropriately dismissed.
17. Historically, most responses addressing ecosystem services have concentrated on the short-term benefits from increasing the productivity of provisioning services (RWG).
18. There are major gaps in global and national monitoring systems that result in the absence of well-documented, comparable, time-series information for many ecosystem features and that pose significant barriers in assessing condition and trends in ecosystem services.
19. There are major gaps in information on nonmarketed ecosystem services, particularly regulating, cultural, and supporting services.
20. Scenarios
    1. There is a lack of analytical and methodological approaches to explicitly nest or link scenarios developed at different geographic scales. This innovation would provide decision-makers with information that directly links local, national, regional, and global futures of ecosystem services in considerable detail.
    2. There is limited modeling capability related to effects of changes in ecosystems on flows of ecosystem services and effects of changes in ecosystem services on changes in human wellbeing. Quantitative models linking ecosystem change to many ecosystem services are also needed.
    3. Significant advances are needed in models that link ecological and social processes, and models do not yet exist for many cultural and supporting ecosystem services.
    4. There is limited capability to incorporate adaptive responses and changes in human attitudes and behaviors in models and to incorporate critical feedbacks into quantitative models. As food supply changes, for example, so will patterns of land use, which will then feedback on ecosystem services, climate, and food supply.
    5. There is a lack of theories and models that anticipate thresholds that, once passed, yield fundamental system changes or even system collapse.
    6. There is limited capability of communicating to non-specialists the complexity associated with holistic models and scenarios involving ecosystem services, in particular in relation to the abundance of nonlinearities, feedbacks, and time lags in most ecosystems.
21. Human cultures, knowledge systems, religions, social interactions, and amenity services have been influenced and shaped by the nature of ecosystems. At the same time, humankind has influenced and shaped its environment to enhance the availability of certain valued services.
22. The MA assessed six main types of cultural and amenity services provided by ecosystems: cultural diversity and identity; cultural landscapes and heritage values; spiritual services; inspiration (such as for arts and folklore); aesthetics; and recreation and tourism.
23. Transformation of once diverse ecosystems into relatively more similar cultivated landscapes, combined with social and economic changes including rapid urbanization, breakdown of extended families, loss of traditional institutions, easier and cheaper transportation, and growing economic and social “globalization,” has significantly weakened the linkages between ecosystems and cultural diversity and cultural identity (C17.2.1).
24. People across cultures and regions express, in general, an aesthetic preference for natural environments over urban or built ones; the conversion and degradation of relatively natural environments has diminished these benefits. Ecosystems continue to inspire arts, songs, drama, dance, design, and fashion, although the stories told through such media are different from those told historically (C17.2.5).
25. Recreation and tourism uses of ecosystems are growing, due to growing populations, greater leisure time available among wealthy populations, and greater infrastructure development to support recreational activities and tourism.
26. In contrast, spiritual, religious, recreational, and educational services tended to be assessed only at a fine scale in small local studies, typically because the data required for these assessments are not available at a broad scale and because of the culture-specific, intangible, and sometimes sensitive nature of these services (SG8.3).

下载源 / Original: Ecosystems and Human Well-being