openLandscapes - Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

University of Kiel, Ecology Centre, Msc Environmental Science, a seminar paper
Status: completed (2009)

Abstract

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) embodies a main global attempt to assessing ecosystem changes and the consequences for human well-being, at levels ranging from global to local. This effort was funded by international donors and carried out by global partners in different working groups. The MA was initiated in June 2001 and published its findings in 2005. The MA recommended immediate action to apprehend and reverse the decline in 15 of the 24 ecosystem services.

Key words: Millennium ecosystem assessment, human well being, ecosystem services, ecosystem.

Content

1. Background

According to the Millennium Assessment organization website, the assessment is a comprehensive inventory of the planet’s environment centering on the interest of human wellness. It focuses on the changes of the environment and their consequences for human health and how such a change may affect the people in the future decade, as well as on types of responses to improve eco-management at local, national and global scale. While global communities need significant scientific information in order to support international treaties and conferences like CBD, Ramsar Convention on Wetland, IPCC, and Global Outlook, the assessment enables them to understand deeper the relationship between humans and ecosystem. Furthermore, it also identifies the potential to curb poverty and improve wellness (MA, 2005).

In part, the goal of the Millennium Assessment is to classify and evaluate policy and management practices to sustain ecosystems and seek compatibility with human needs. It would also seek effort to further evaluate the compatibility of existing policies at different levels and scales. Moreover, it shall create sound and comprehensive ecosystem management, and the developed methodology can be utilized as a decision making support tool. In short, it unifies the structures of ecological principles, a management framework, a bundle of new methods and management principles in the international community (WRI, 2005).

Its initial planning meetings for sub-global assessments in Southeast Asia, Southern Africa and Europe took place in 2001 when panel members were appointed. Following to that groundbreaking meeting, a formal public launch of MA’s first work “Conceptual Framework of MA” was published in 2003. Finally, in March 2005, the report of synthesized findings was released (MA, 2005).

The major work of Millennium Assessment was done through a grand international cooperation involving international organizations; both governmental and non-governmental, public and private sector, educational and research institutes. It includes UNEP, UNDP, FAO, UNESCO, Rockefeller Foundation, NASA, the Government of Norway, University of Wisconsin, the World Bank, WRI, CBD, and many more. Running at a US$24 million budget, the assessment employed around 1300 experts from 95 countries. It was organized into four working groups (e.g. Condition & Trends; Scenarios; Responses, and Sub-global) (MA, 2005).

According to a synthesis report written by the WRI in 2005 as shown below, the groups were tasked to investigate the state of environment, constructing future scenarios, analyse responses, and coordinated the task at all levels.

Table 1. Major Working Groups in Millennium Assessment (WRI, 2005)

Condition and Trends	Scenarios		Responses
What is the current condition and historical trends of ecosystems and their services? What have been the consequences of changes in ecosystems for human well-being?	Given plausible changes in primary drivers, what will be the consequences for ecosystems, their services, and human well-being?		What can we do to enhance well being and ecosystems
Sub Global		All of the above at regional, national, local scales

These groups organized planning meetings, compile data, evaluated, interpreted results and formulated technical reports. The websites of Millennium Assessment recorded that the first 2003 publication was to set up the assessment framework, produce synthesized technical reports, and start the comprehensive global assessment. It faced data sources ranged from scientific literature, peer-reviewed models and datasets, integrating private sectors, local communities, indigenous people, and practitioners (MA, 2005).

In doing so, the assessment exercised a multi-scale approach due to reasons such as greater temporal, causal, spatial details. Thus, independent validation of the conclusion made at large scale within smaller scale studies, while most of findings at smaller scale then became large in context. The concept allowed excellent reporting and response options to the respecting decision makers, local communities, on-site regulation institutions, local governmental units, national institution, or higher authorities (Island Press, 2007).

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2. Discussion: findings; pro-cons, lesson learned

As discussed on a brief toolkit to understand better the Millennium Assessment published by the Island Press in 2007, the guiding literature reiterates that human well-being is the focus and major priority while environment and natural resources are thought to have intrinsic values. It does also acknowledge that humans and ecosystem both have a dynamic interaction whereas changes on each may affect both components (Island Press, 2007).

The key findings of the assessment indicated by Greenfacts, a non-governmental environmental group, include:

Humans have been changing the global ecosystems at increasingly faster rates due to rising demands for food, freshwater, timber, fiber and fuel causing losses of biodiversity.
These changes posed positive gains in human well-being and economic development.
This also implies the degradation of many ecosystem services and a rise of poverty. Unless addressed, this degradation will continue to hold UN members to reach Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Reducing pressure and reversing degradation while meeting human demands remain serious challenges.

As illustrated on the graph below, the findings are mapped among human well-being, direct and indirect drivers, and ecosystem services.

Figure 1. Relationship Diagram of Human and Ecosystem Services (MA, 2005).

The website of Millennium Ecosystem Assessment further discussed the interrelationships between elements of the diagram. On the upper left box, Human well-being and reduction of poverty are placed in the center to indicate the focus of the assessment. Thus, pivoting from the human perspective, the assessment revisits five dimensions of human basic needs such as health, minimum material to support a good life, good social relations, sense of security and freedom of choice and action. However, if one applies changes to the upper right box consisting indirect factors such as population, technology and lifestyle, it can drive an action that directly influences the status of the ecosystem, such as overfishing or application of fertilizers.

Reacting to direct pressures, the ecosystem then may not be able to sustain optimum production of quality services, hence, affecting the quality of human well being. These interplays can happen on many scales including local, regional and global. Admittedly, while the Millennium Assessment attempts to categorize, classify, and personalize factors influencing the ecosystem services, it does acknowledge the degree of complexity in the analysis since many categories overlap extensively (MA, 2005).

On the lower left box, the assessment specifically considers the benefit that people can obtain from the ecosystem. Thus, it identifies major ecosystem services including provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting services. Furthermore, the Millennium Assessment elaborates the consequences of changes in ecosystems which affect many aspects of human well being on different groups of people. The assessment believes that understanding the factors altering the ecosystem services is essential to design interventions leading to positive effects for the ecosystems (MA, 2005).

Within a closed loop between its core boxes, there is conceptual systematical feedback referring to how people and society formulate “strategies to cope with changing ecosystems in order to maintain well-being”. Shown by the arrows, these feedbacks represent “if-then” relationships among boxes (MA, 2005). In reality, however, one may find more complicated relationships while assessing the direct, indirect drivers that change the ecosystem and human well-being.

While assessing Human well-being, the MA constructed a quality based graph depicting five major dimensions asserting the good and the bad quality of life as shown in Figure 2 (MA, 2005).

Figure 2. The Main Dimensions of Well-being and its Obverse, Ill-being (MA, 2005).

This model has lead MA to note several findings in human well-being including:

Over the past years, human well-being has improved. Vary among the regions, a positive trend shown through better national income, population growth, better life expectancies, and increasing participatory in political institutions.
Well-being is not evenly distributed among individuals, countries, or social groups. Inequality is high while economic gaps between the haves and the have-nots increase.
The degree of well-being vary across ecosystem is not the same everywhere. Human well-being in terms of per capita incomes is found 40% higher in coastal zones of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa than they are in drylands.
Populations are increasing in low well-being ecosystem. For an example, human population is growing in sub-Saharan Africa and less-favored lands of Asia.

While continuously being reviewed, the Millennium Assessment poses several challenges and weaknesses such as:

MA has not pushed forward policies and decision making in developing countries.
There is no working model readily used to analyse eco-services and develop policies and resource allocations.
Needs more research to cover gaps among biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, ecosystem services, human being and economic valuation.
Lacks of fund for numbers of sub-global assessments and lacks of awareness of the MA among various stakeholders.

However, there are important lesson learned through the assessment. For instance:

Include ecosystem protection in all decision making and improve coordination among multilateral environmental agreements and other international institutions.
Make government and the private sector more transparent and accountable.
Obtain the proper scale since ecosystem management is often too centralized.
Protect the whole ecosystem, not just its parts. A key challenge is to develop more holistic strategies that incorporate all of these concerns, such as integrated management of coastal zones.

Shown on Figure 3, the MA synthesized four major scenarios concerning the global environmental challenge (Greenfacts, 2005).

Figure 3. Number of Ecosystem Services enhanced or degraded by 2050 based on four MA scenarios (MA, 2005).

The MA notes that the Global Orchestration scenario suggest to a globalized society whereas focused policies in global trade and liberalized economy are making it possible for every government to have equal access and participation to the markets of goods and services. This approach promotes economic growth with goals to reduce poverty and expand global middle class. In line with this global scheme are environmental issues like climate change and fisheries. On the other side, people are left vulnerable when facing unexpected surprises from delayed action since threats to human well-being derived by environmental problems are often overlooked before they become apparent. Meanwhile, the rationale of growing economies promises larger demand for global consumption of ecosystem services on many areas including agricultural products such as fish, meat and vegetables. These only benefit certain urban population while problem like loss of wildlands in the rural setting does not therefore receive adequate attention. Greenfacts noted that this scenario may degrade ecosystem services in which poor people are depended upon for their well-beings (Greenfacts, 2005).

The Adapting Mosaic scenario, based on regional watershed-scale ecosystems is suggested to be an alternative focus of political and economic activity. This scenario foresees local ecosystem management strategies run by solid local institutions. This seems appropriate since there is a great cultural variation among nations and regions in styles of governance. However, the sideback of this scenario is that eventually, the focus on local governance leads to failures in managing the global resources. This is true when problems like climate change, marine fisheries, and pollution get more complicated and intensified. Acting locally, solutions that were effective in the regions are continually being adopted among close local networks. The advantage of sharing good solutions ultimately is that it can improve social and environmental issues, from urban poverty to agricultural water pollution (Greenfacts, 2005).

The Techno Garden scenario refers to a global world relying strongly on technology development to manage, often in the form of engineering systems, ecosystem services. While generally efficiency of ecosystem service provision may improve, there are risks inherently found in broad-scale man-made solutions and rigid control of ecosystems. Integrating with the market-oriented institutional reform are common methods to achieve solutions to environmental issues. Having two edges of solution, this method is designed to benefit both the economy and the environment. Greenfacts noted that starting by numbers of investment in green technology is accompanied by a strong focus on economic development and education, thus improving people's lives and helping them understand how ecosystems make their livelihoods possible (Greenfacts, 2005).

The Order from Strength scenario means “a concept of regionalized and fragmented world, concerned with security and protection, emphasizing primarily regional markets, and paying little attention to common goods”, according to Greenfacts. Strong view of protectionism are being applied as the role of government expands in managing national resources such as oil, water systems, and other strategic businesses. While trade is highly restricted, large amounts of money are invested in security systems, and technological progress in a slow rate. If trends are continued in this manner, Greenfacts noted that international treaties on global climate change, international fisheries, and the trade in endangered species are weakly implemented, resulting only in the degradation of the global environment. Thus, particularly, natural resource-based industries are shifted to poorer nations (Greenfacts, 2005).

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3. Conclusion

As one may conclude, there are many actionable policies that have been implemented implied by the assessment. These recommendations call for major stakeholders to:

Reduce consumption of unsustainably managed ecosystem services.
Eliminate subsidies for unsustainable resource use
Improve environmental communication and education
Promote technologies that increase crop yields without increasing pollution and land degradation.
Restore degraded ecosystems and promote technologies to increase energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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References

Island Press. “Millennium Ecosystem Assessment: A toolkit for Understanding and Action”. 2007. Island pres. 3 June. 2009: http://www.islandpress.org/
WRI, Ecosystem and Human Well-being: a report of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Island Press. Washington, D.C: World Resources Institute, 2005

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Useful links

Greenfacts. “Scientific Facts on Ecosystem Change”. 2005. Greenfacts. 3 June. 2009: http://www.greenfacts.org/
MA. Millennium Assessment. 2005. Ecosystem and Human well-being: A framework for Assessment. 3 June 2009. http://www.millenniumassessment.org/en/Framework.aspx.
UNEP, WCMC. “A Global Strategy for MA Follow-up”. 2004. UNEP. 3 June. 2009 http://www.unep-wcmc.org/EAP/MA-Follow-up-strategy.aspx
WHO. Ecosystems and Human well being: Health Synthesis. 2005. WHO. 16 October 2009: http://www.who.int/globalchange/ecosystems/ecosystems05/en/index.html.

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