Publications

The CEBioS Programme (Capacities for Biodiversity and Sustainable Development), in cooperation with UNESCO, published the EVAMAB – Guidance for the Assessment of Ecosystem Services in African Biosphere Reserves.

The EVAMAB-project addressed the evaluation of the economic value of ecosystem services (ES) in UNESCO-MAB sites from a regional perspective (Africa) and focused on sites from 4 countries: Benin, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda. The project results are contributing to the transition to green economy in Africa. [Read more…] about New UNESCO manual for assessing ecosystem services in African Biosphere Reserves

A recently published article in Earth System Governance’ Special Issue co-authored by GreenFormation expert, Agnes Zolyomi provides an overview of a systemic analysis that assessed a century of ecosystem services and their impacts on policy. Assessing ecosystem services and assigning an economic value to them has been thought of as the silver bullet to shed light on nature’s immense value in a deepening environmental crisis. They were expected to bring the breakthrough for biodiversity prioritisation. The figures and monetary values were thought to change policy-makers’ minds to prioritise biodiversity in their agendas. To date, there has been limited research exploring how the concept of ecosystem services has impacted policy. This new study aims to provide an overview about the achieved policy impacts, enabling and hindering factors as well as lessons learnt. You can read the open access article here.

Although ecosystems provide numerous ecosystem services for humanity, many have come under pressure from human intervention and are currently in a degraded or even destroyed state. In order to improve the condition of already damaged ecosystems, the implementation of suitable restoration measures as well as an efficient system of economic incentives are required to motivate stakeholders to voluntarily invest in sustainable management methods. With the proceedings of the workshop the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) contributes to shed light on the socio-economic parameters of restoration of degraded ecosystems in order to carefully advice recent political initiatives, to further strengthen the interdisciplinary exchange and to inform other stakeholders about economic aspects of nature restoration.

Find the proceedings here.