Mapping and assessment of ecosystems and their services in the EU

Joachim Maes, Markus Erhard, Anne Teller, Maria Luisa Paracchini, Francesca Somma, Jos I. Barredo, Ana Cristina Cardoso, Jan-Erik Petersen

Action 5 of the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 calls Member States in a first stage to map and assess the state of ecosystems and their services in their national territory with the assistance of the European Commission. It also requires in a second stage Member States to assess the economic value of such services, and to promote the integration of these values into accounting and reporting systems at EU and national level by 2020. The results of this mapping and assessment should support the maintenance and restoration of ecosystems and their services, which is target 2 of the biodiversity strategy. A Working Group on Mapping and Assessment on Ecosystems and their Services (MAES) was set up under the Common Implementation Framework (CIF), the governance structure to underpin the effective delivery of the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020. The objective of the MAES Working Group is to support the implementation of Action 5 by the EU and its Member States. The first action of the Working Group was to support the development of a coherent analytical framework to be applied by the EU and its Member States in order to ensure consistent approaches are used. A second step was to initiate a series of pilot studies to identify available knowledge that can be used to map ecosystems and assess their condition and the services they provide at different spatial scales. This paper presents the first results of the EU mapping and assessment of ecosystem services at EU scale and proposes a common framework for the Member States. In order to provide operational recommendations to both EU and its Member States, the proposed work structure for the ecosystem pilots suggests a 4 step approach, mirroring the milestones Member States have to achieve in their assessment: 1. Map the concerned ecosystems; 2. Assess ecosystem condition; 3. Quantify the services provided; 4. Integrated ecosystem assessment including also valuation. This paper demonstrates this approach using examples of how ecosystem state and services can be mapped at pan European scale and how this information can be used to help prioritize areas for ecosystem restoration and development of green infrastructure.