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Biodiversity and Systematics

Milllennium Ecosystem Assessment - Biodiversity Responses

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(modified from Millennium Ecosystem Assessment website)

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) is an international work program designed to meet the needs of decision makers and the public for scientific information concerning the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and options for responding to those changes. The MA was launched by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in June 2001 and it will help to meet assessment needs of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Convention to Combat Desertification, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, and the Convention on Migratory Species, as well as needs of other users in the private sector and civil society. If the MA proves to be useful to its stakeholders, it is anticipated that an assessment process modeled on the MA will be repeated every 510 years and that ecosystem assessments will be regularly conducted at national or sub-national scales.

The MA focuses on ecosystem services (the benefits people obtain from ecosystems), how changes in ecosystem services have affected human well-being, how ecosystem changes may affect people in future decades, and response options that might be adopted at local, national, or global scales to improve ecosystem management and thereby contribute to human well-being and poverty alleviation. The specific issues being addressed by the assessment have been defined through consultation with the MA users.

The MA will:

• Identify priorities for action;
• Provide tools for planning and management;
• Provide foresight concerning the consequences of decisions affecting ecosystems;
• Identify response options to achieve human development and sustainability goals;
• Help build individual and institutional capacity to undertake integrated ecosystem assessments and to act on their findings.

The MA synthesizes information from the scientific literature, datasets, and scientific models, and makes use of knowledge held by the private sector, practioners, local communities and indigenous peoples. All of the MA findings undergo rigorous peer review.

The MA is governed by a board comprised of representatives of international conventions, UN agencies, scientific organizations and leaders from the private sector, civil society, and indigenous organizations. A 13-member assessment panel of leading social and natural scientists oversees the technical work of the assessment supported by a secretariat with offices in Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa and coordinated by the United Nations Environment Programme. More than 500 authors are involved in four expert working groups preparing the global assessment and hundreds more are undertaking more than a dozen sub-global assessments.

The four-year MA budget is approximately $17 million, with more than $7 million of additional support through in-kind contributions. Major financial support for the MA is being provided by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the United Nations Foundation, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, The World Bank, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the Government of Norway, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

In the Global Responses Assessment, the MA will identify policy, institutional, legislative or technological changes that could improve the management of ecosystems, thereby increasing their contributions to development and maintaining their long-term sustainability. The Response Options Working Group will assess the effectiveness of various types of response options, both historical and current. A series of case studies will be used to assess the effectiveness of response options to deal with particular issues concerning the intrinsic value of biodiversity, ecosystem services, and the consequences of changes in ecosystems on human wellbeing. The group will use the case studies to develop a methodology that could be used by policy makers to evaluate response options in a way that will reveal opportunities for "linked" responses that address multiple goods and services or multiple user needs.

Within the Global Responses Assessment, one chapter focuses on response options related to the conservation of biodiversity, but with attention also to broader issues concerning human well-being. Coordinating Lead Authors for this chapter are Drs. McNeely (IUCN), Albers (Resources for the Future) and Faith (Australian Museum).

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