Suchergebnisse

In 2014, the International Union for Conservation of Nature adopted the Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) criteria as the global standard for assessing risks to terrestrial, marine, and freshwater ecosystems. Five years on, it is timely to ask what impact this new initiative has had on ecosystem management and conservation. In this policy perspective, we use an impact evaluation framework to distinguish the outputs, outcomes, and impacts of the RLE since its inception. To date, 2,821 ecosystems in 100 countries have been assessed following the RLE protocol. Systematic assessments are complete or underway in 21 countries and two continental regions (the Americas and Europe). Countries with established ecosystem policy infrastructure have already used the RLE to inform legislation, land-use planning, protected area management, monitoring and reporting, and ecosystem management. Impacts are still emerging due to varying pace and commitment to implementation across different countries. In the future, RLE indices based on systematic assessments have high potential to inform global biodiversity reporting. Expanding the coverage of RLE assessments, building capacity and political will to undertake them, and establishing stronger policy instruments to manage red-listed ecosystems will be key to maximizing conservation impacts over the coming decades.

An ecosystem is a dynamic complex of plant, animal and microorganism communities and their non-living environment, interacting as a functional unit. The EU ecosystem assessment analysed the following ecosystems: urban ecosystems, agroecosystems (cropland and grassland), forests, wetlands, heathlands and shrubs, sparsely vegetated lands (beaches, dunes, rocky areas in mountains), rivers and lakes, and marine ecosystems. The boundaries between ecosystem types are often more difficult to draw than this simple classification suggests. For instance, peatlands are considered wetlands but often used and classified as forests or agroecosystems. The EU ecosystem assessment used the Corine Land Cover information system to classify (based on EUNIS habitat classification) and map ecosystems but for wetlands, floodplains and urban areas also dedicated boundaries were drawn. The different ecosystems cover the full EU territory [...]. Ecosystem services are the contributions of ecosystems to economic, social, cultural and other benefits that people derive from ecosystems. For instance, pollination, the provision of food, timber and clean air, water filtration, carbon sequestration and storage or nature-based recreation are all ecosystem services. The above definitions are set in the EU Directives mentioned above (for ecosystem status) as well as in Regulation (EU) 2020/8522 of the European Parliament and of the Council on the establishment of a framework to facilitate sustainable investment.