Ecosystem services

Ecosystem services are benefits that people derive from nature. The can be both tangible such as food and materials as well as non-tangible such as recreation and a stable climate.

The term ecosystem services was coined to raise awareness of the many ways that nature underlies our well-being. We rely on ecosystem services in numerous aspects of our lives  ranging from securing nutrition to living in a predictable world and carrying our culture onwards in time. By shifting focus to ecosystem functioning we are also better able to understand  how human activities affect the provisioining of ecosystem services. This supports the global acts towards sustainable use of our environment.