Michalis Skourtos

Ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation: concepts and a glossary.

The RUBICODE project draws on expertise from a range of disciplines to develop and integrate frameworks for assessing the impacts of environmental change on ecosystem service provision, and for rationalising biodiversity conservation in that light. With such diverse expertise and concepts involved, interested parties will not be familiar with all the key terminology. This paper defines the terms as used within the project and, where useful, discusses some reasoning behind the definitions. Terms are grouped by concept rather than being listed alphabetically.

Research needs for incorporating the ecosystem service approach into EU biodiversity conservation policy

Using a range of different methods including extensive reviews, workshops and an electronic conference, 70 key research recommendations and 12 priority research needs to integrate the ecosystem services approach into biodiversity conservation policy and funding were identified by a cross-disciplinary group of over 100 scientists and 50 stakeholders, including research funders and policy-makers. These recommendations focus on the ecological underpinning of ecosystem services, drivers that affect ecosystems and their services, biological traits and ecosystem services, the valuation of ecosystem services, spatial and temporal scales in ecosystem service assessment, indicators of ecosystem services, and habitat management, conservation policy and ecosystem services. The recommendations in this paper help steer the research agenda on ecosystem services into policy-relevant areas, agreed upon by funders, researchers and policy-makers. This research agenda will only succeed with increased collaboration between researchers across disciplines, thereby providing a challenge to the research community and research funders to work in new, interdisciplinary ways.

Cross-sectoral interactions of adaptation and mitigation measures

Adaptation and mitigation are complementary strategies for addressing the impacts of climate change, yet are often considered separately. This paper examines the literature for evidence of the interactions of adaptation and mitigation measures across the agriculture, biodiversity, coasts, forests, urban and water sectors, focusing on Europe. It found that often adaptation and mitigation synergies and conflicts were not explicitly mentioned within a sector, let alone between sectors. Most measures, however, were found to have an effect on another sector, resulting in neutral, positive (synergies) or negative (conflicts) interactions within and between sectors. Many positive cross-sectoral interactions involved biodiversity or water and thus these could represent good starting places for the implementation of integrated, cross-sectoral strategies. Previous studies suggest that adaptation and mitigation are undertaken on different time and geographical scales; this study found many local scale measures which could facilitate integration between both adaptation and mitigation. It is important that cross-sectoral interaction of adaptation and mitigation measures are explicitly recognised if they are to be mainstreamed into policy, so that positive outcomes are enhanced and unintended consequences avoided.

Linking Sea Level Rise Damage and Vulnerability Assessment: The Case of Greece

Throughout the course of modern history, coasts have been a substantial means of human development and an ever-growing number of people still continue to colonize the coasts worldwide. Coasts comprise dynamic and complex socio-ecological systems, encompassing a variety of biotic and abiotic elements. Their complexity and dynamics are reflected in the multiplicity of their forms. Their dynamic nature is responsible for their high productivity, leading both to periodic changes and gradual mutation. The marine ecosystems, by storing carbon dioxide and by releasing oxygen to the atmosphere through the living processes of the phytoplankton population, play a significant role in regulating climate. The coastal areas help create and preserve microclimates. The existence of coastal forests and wetlands ensures minimization of floods, erosion and other natural disasters, and offers valuable regulating and supporting ecosystem services. The importance of coastal resources for the prosperity of coastal areas can be specified through the ecosystem services and goods, which support the human life (Daily, 1997; Turner et al., 2001; Beaumont, 2007; Kontogianni et al., 2010a). The categorization of coastal services and goods is presented in Table 1. However, the ensuing anthropogenic activities of industrialization and economic growth have brought the coastal areas under intense pressure. Climatic change accentuates these pressures while it makes mean sea level rise (SLR) one of the most predictable and alarming impacts globally (Church et al., 2001; Nicholls, 2007). To make things worse, SLR is known to be rather inelastic against the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (OECD, 2006), a phenomenon known as “commitment to SLR”. That is, even if drastic reduction policies globally succeed in stabilizing the climate, SLR and the accompanying phenomena of coastal erosion and storm surges will continue to occur for centuries (Meehl et al., 2005; Wigley, 2005), causing possible tipping points for some systems (Tipping Points Report, 2009). This chapter examines the impacts of SLR on the Greek coastal zone and appraises their economic dimension. Researchers engaged in studies like this face two important issues. The first is the quantification of the economic impacts (damages) caused by the losses of coastal areas due to SLR. The second is the ex ante estimation of welfare gains from reducing SLR risks, since this estimation constitutes an important input for decision-making regarding

Principles for the application of the cost-effectiveness analysis in water quality sector

Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) provides useful information for the cost and the environmental effectiveness of alternative management options in realising a given environmental goal. The purpose of this paper is to present factors that could be considered essential for the identification of the most cost-effective combination of the measures for water quality management. The reviewed literature focuses on the control of anthropogenic eutrophication. However, there seems to be no research case studies where all factors suggested in this paper are examined. Furthermore, tables could be used as a tool in order to facilitate the consideration of these quantitative and qualitative data.

In Search of Marine Ecosystem Services Values: The V-MESSES Database

Economic valuation of marine ecosystem services is strongly anchored within the logic of Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). An inventory and critical assessment of marine valuation studies was conducted within the European Union funded Policy-oriented marine Environmental Research for the Southern European Seas (PERSEUS) research project (http://www.perseus-net.eu/) and this information was fed into a suitable, spatially explicit valuation database, namely Valuation database for Marine Ecosystem Services of Southern European Seas (V-MESSES), with the objective of providing monetary values for Southern European Seas (SES) to be used in cost–benefit and cost-effectiveness applications. At present, the database contains 93 studies offering over 110 value estimates for four categories and 20 subcategories of marine ecosystem services covering all regions of Mediterranean and Black Sea. The database enables so far the estimation of the aggregated value of all ecosystem services. However, the selection of appropriate, policy relevant value estimates is not a simple and straightforward task, since several conditions should be met in order to conduct effective and efficient value transfers. Bearing in mind the above limitations, tentative reference value estimates are compiled from the V-MESSES database for a number of coastal and marine ecosystem services, although not all service categories are covered sufficiently.