PARENT SESSION
Symposium 10: The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment Conceptual Framework: An Ecological and Social Challenge
Organized by: L Neville and H Mooney
Wednesday, August 6. 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM, SITCC Oglethorpe Auditorium.

Social and economic drivers of change in ecosystem goods and services.

Nelson, Gerald^*,1, ¹ department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, Urbana, IL

ABSTRACT- Human transformation of ecosystems is central to global change. The change process is driven by millions of individual decision-makers who determine the use of the part of an ecosystem over which they exercise some degree of control. The decisions that directly influence ecosystem goods and services are fundamentally local. They depend on location-specific natural resources such as climate and land quality, and location-specific socioeconomic variables such as prices and infrastructure availability. However, the local drivers are often determined by decision-making processes that lie well outside the ecosystem. In turn, the consequences of local decisions can sometimes be found in distant places and times. This presentation will focus on the MA conceptual framework that relates the drivers of human behavior in ecosystems to the outcomes on ecosystem condition and service delivery.

Key words: ecosystem, economics