Category Archives: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Crop per Drop vs. Water for Ecosystem Services

Colin Chartres the International Water Management Institute‘s director general writes Invest in water for farming, or the world will go hungry.  In SciDev.net he writes: The world’s population is projected to grow from 6 billion to 8.5 billion by 2030 … Continue reading

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Society and Environment (ENVR 201) reading list

This semester I am co-teaching the first year course Society and the Environment in the McGill School of Environment. I teach a diverse set of lectures that are mainly focussed on commons, urban ecosystems, and resilience, but also include cost-benefit … Continue reading

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Enhancing ecosystem services in agricultural lands

Farmers are the stewards of a third of the world’s terrestrial surface, the amount of land covered by croplands and grazing areas. Although the land use in these areas might be the dominant driver behind loss of ecosystem services globally … Continue reading

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Scenarios for Ecosystem Services a Special Feature in Ecology and Society

Steve Carpenter, Elena Bennett and I, edited a Special Feature on Scenarios for Ecosystem Services in Ecology and Society. The special feature is a open-access collection of seven papers that provides an overview of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Scenarios. The … Continue reading

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Great Transition Papers

Global Scenario Group developed a pioneering set of global environmental scenarios, which presented six global scenarios. There were three main scenario types, which each had two variants, producing: Conventional Worlds (Policy Reform and Market Forces), Barbarization (Fortress world and Breakdown), … Continue reading

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Millennium Ecosystem Assessment: Research Needs

In an enhanced Policy Forum in Science 314 (5797): 257, Steve Carpenter and several other senior participants from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) that outlines the Research Needs identified by the MA. They highlight the need for: Theory Linking Ecological … Continue reading

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Biodiversity Loss Threatens Human Well-Being

Sandra Díaz, Joseph Fargione, Terry Chapin and David Tilman have nice a Millennium Ecosystem Assessment based review essay Biodiversity Loss Threatens Human Well-Being in PLOS Biology. The article summarizes current understanding of how biodiversity influences human wellbeing. Human societies have … Continue reading

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Ecology and Development: the MA & MDGs

The economist Jeffrey Sachs, the director the development oriented Millennium Project, and the ecologist Walt Reid, former director of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment have written a joint policy forum in Science (May 19, 2006) Investments Toward Sustainable Development. They note … Continue reading

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MA: Putting a Price Tag on the Planet

Putting a Price Tag on the Planet is a long article by Lila Guterman on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in the April 7, 2006 The Chronicle of Higher Education. The article describes the history, funding, and operation of the MA … Continue reading

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Survey of Initial Impacts of Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment‘s general synthesis report was released about a year ago. On March 21 2006, the MA released an assessment of the initial impact of the MA. The report is written by Walt Reid, the director of the … Continue reading

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