Ecosystems and their services for an evidence-based policy and decision-making

Intro

Europe’s ecosystems, on which we depend for instance for food, timber, clean air, clean water, climate regulation and recreation, suffer from unrelenting pressures caused by intensive use of land or sea, climate change, pollution, overexploitation of natural resources and invasive alien species. Ensuring that ecosystems achieve or maintain a healthy state or a good condition is a key requirement to secure the sustainability of human activities and human well-being.

Scope

– Improve the assessment of the condition of ecosystems while providing uptake of the assessment’s outcomes in policy
– Address regional diversity and the corresponding decision level
– Iinvestigate how ecosystem condition is related to the capacity of ecosystems to deliver ecosystem services
– Develop and test methods and tools to consistently report harmonised and verified ecosystem data that can be used to regularly report or assess the pressures and condition of ecosystems, dynamics, trends and changes over time
– Test and demonstrate the links between biodiversity, ecosystems and macro-economic policies and national policies for instance on agriculture, fisheries, forestry and climate

Objective

– The policy decisions affecting the environment
– Evidence and awareness of the importance of biodiversity, healthy ecosystems and the social and economic values that emerge from them
– Restoration targets and secure the sustainability of human activities and human well-being