PARENT SESSION
Special Session 12: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Part I: A synthesis of core findings
Organized by: EM Bennett and H Mooney
Thursday, August 11, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Exhibit Hall 210a-e, Level 2, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Ecosystem services and the Millennium Development Goals.
Wall, Diana1, 1 Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, Ft. Collins, CO, United States
ABSTRACT- With 1990 as its baseline, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) developed by the UN aim by 2015 to improve human well-being (HWB) by reducing poverty, hunger, child and maternal mortality, ensuring education for all, controlling and managing diseases, tackling gender disparity, ensuring sustainable development and pursuing global partnerships. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) is primarily concerned with ecosystem services and how to best manage them for the benefit of HWB. Ecosystem services are categorized by supporting, provisioning, regulating and cultural services and HWB as defined by the MA, involves multiple constituents, including basic material for a good life, freedoms and choices, health, good social relations and security. The MA suggests that the 2015 MDG targets are more likely to be achieved if the MDGs are addressed simultaneously and identifies which Goals are directly or indirectly dependent on supporting, provisioning, regulating, and cultural services. While most targets (such as poverty, hunger, gender, child mortality, disease, water, and sustainable development) are dependent on ecosystem services, some targets are less dependent or indirectly linked to ecosystem services and these include education, maternal mortality, and global partnerships. The evidence synthesized by the MA underlines that ecosystem services can only be sustained in the long term if the integrity and completeness of ecosystems are maintained or restored. This information and the tools for improved management of ecosystems need to be integrated more systematically into development strategies, such as poverty and hunger reduction strategies at local, regional and global levels, to achieve the goals of the MDG.
Key words: MA, MDG, assessment, multi-scale