"…it is impossible to devise effective environmental policy unless it is based on sound scientific information.

"While major advances in data collection have been made in many areas, large gaps in our knowledge remain. In particular, there has never been a comprehensive global assessment of the world’s majorecosystems.

" The planned Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a major international collaborative effort to map the health of our planet, is a response to this need….I call on Member States to help provide the necessary financial support for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and to become actively engaged in it."

-- Kofi Annan
UN Secretary General
April 3, 2000

Strengthening capacity to manage ecosystems for human development

World Resources 2000-2001 reports on the results of a year-long study of the condition of the world’s ecosystems -- the Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems (PAGE).

But the PAGE study faced limitations in the basic data needed to determine the condition of global ecosystems.

In fact, a principal finding of the PAGE study is that properly assessing the world’s ecosystems will require a larger, more comprehensive effort to monitor and compile information on current ecosystem conditions, and to analyze the effects of future changes in ecosystems.

This effort, organized and supported by an array of governments, UN agencies, and leading scientific organizations, is called the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA). The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was officially launched officially at the United Nations on June 5, 2001.

What is the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment?

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment is a process designed to improve the management of ecosystems and their contribution to human development by helping to bring the best available information and knowledge on ecosystem goods and services to bear on policy and management decisions. The MA consists of a global scientific assessment of ecosystems, as well as catalytic regional, national, and local assessments. A primary aim is to build capacity at all levels to undertake integrated ecosystem assessments and to act on their findings.

Why is the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment needed?

Both the challenge of effectively managing earth’s ecosystems and the consequences of failure will increase significantly during the 21st century. The scientific knowledge required to meet this challenge is unavailable today. In order to make sound ecosystem management decisions in the next century a dramatic increase, or "step change," is needed in the information brought to bear on resource management decisions. An integrated assessment of global ecosystems, with strong regional and local components, can play an instrumental role in helping to meet information needs and in catalyzing other assessments to meet those needs. Globally, such a process would generate new information, assess current knowledge, develop methodological tools, and increase public understanding. At local, national, and regional scales it would build the capacity to obtain, analyze, and act on improved information.

A focus on goods and services

The MA will focus on the capacity of ecosystems to provide goods and services that are important to human development. To accomplish this, it will consider the underlying ecosystem processes on which those goods and services depend. But the MA will not address only the biological attributes of goods and services; it will also explicitly consider social and economic attributes such as employment and economic value.

More specifically, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment will address:

• Current ecosystem extent, trends, pressures, condition, and value
  The MA will provide "baseline" information for the year 2000 on the geographic extent of different ecosystems -- including terrestrial, freshwater, and marine -- and the land- or resource-use patterns associated with them. It will present information on trends in ecosystem goods and services, their condition and value, their contribution to human development, and pressures affecting them.

• Ecosystem scenarios and trade-offs
  The MA will present a range of plausible scenarios for how the quantity and quality of ecosystem goods and services may change in coming decades in different regions of the world. It will assess the trade-offs among various goods and services and identify opportunities to increase the aggregate benefits that ecosystems provide.

• Response options
  The MA will identify policy, institutional, or technological changes that could improve the management of ecosystems, thereby increasing their contributions to development and maintaining their long-term sustainability.

A local, regional, and global process

The MA will consist of a global assessment and approximately ten catalytic assessments undertaken at regional, national, and local scales.

Ecosystems are highly differentiated in space and time. Regional, national, and local assessments are needed to provide the information on ecosystem condition that will be needed for sound management. But assessments at these scales alone are insufficient because some processes -- such as the global biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen, and water -- can only be understood at a global scale. In addition, goods, services, matter, and energy are often transferred across regions.

Different objectives at different scales

• The global component of the MA will establish a baseline for future assessments, help meet information needs of the international conventions, establish methodologies for integrated ecosystem assessments, and raise public awareness about the importance of ecosystem goods and services. The global component will be uniquely suited to assessing change in global ecological processes.

• The regional, national, and local components of the MA will cover only a small portion of the globe, but will help to catalyze more widespread use of integrated assessments and will help to develop the methodologies and modeling tools needed by those assessments. They will also provide information that will bear directly on management and policy decisions in the regions where they are conducted and they will be uniquely suited to assessing trade-offs and interlinkages among various goods and services. The development of scenarios describing plausible future condition of ecosystem goods and services will also take place at a regional level and be synthesized at the global level.

By including local, national, and regional, components as integral components of the global assessment, the MA will better reflect regional differences, serve a direct capacity-building role, and facilitate the involvement of regional and local expertise. Integration of the various components will be assured structurally through a Committee comprised of the chairs of each component activity and substantively by developing and following an agreed-upon methodology at all scales.

Building on existing information and institutions

The MA will build on the extensive information available through other international or national assessment, monitoring, and research activities and through institutions charged with maintaining ecosystem data. When information is needed that is not already available from these sources, the MA will work in partnership with existing institutions to fill that need.

Capacity building will be a central objective of the MA process. The regional, national, and local components of the MA will directly strengthen the institutions involved. The information, methodologies, and modeling tools developed through the MA will be of use to national and sub-national assessment processes around the world. Finally, the MA will help to justify and promote the data collection and monitoring efforts needed to meet information needs at all scales.

For more information on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, see http://www.millenniumassessment.org