The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development

T past two decades have seen a growing worldwide awareness of environmental problems such as loss and degradation of ecological habitats. Nations have responded by adopting multilateral agreements—the United Nations (UN) Framework Convention on Climate Change, for example—and many governments have strengthened environmental policies. Moreover, a growing number of companies are changing their business practices to more explicitly address social and environmental responsibility. Indeed, people everywhere have come to recognize that the environment is one of the pillars of sustainable development. This is reflected in the the UN General Assembly’s adoption of the Millennium Development Goals, one of which is a commitment to ensure environmental sustainability. Yet despite this growing awareness, the gap between science and environmental policy remains large. More needs to be done to ensure that knowledge generated by the scientific community is brought to bear on policy decisions. At the same time, the scientific community must address the key issues that modern society faces. There have been a number of attempts to strengthen the scientific basis of environmental policies, including a wide range of assessments of current environmental knowledge and its relevance for decisionmaking. Perhaps the best known is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has produced three reports through a process that involves hundreds of scientists worldwide (IPCC 2002). These reports have informed policy decisions adopted in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. A similar process was used to conduct the Global Biodiversity Assessment (Heywood and Watson 1995). Efforts to perform a global international water assessment are ongoing, and a global assessment of agriculture is proposed. These efforts to provide a comprehensive synthesis of the scientific knowledge in these areas have, however, had a limited influence on international policy. I believe this is to a large extent because decisionmakers were not given adequate ownership in some of these processes. It is also a consequence of the limitations to scientists’ understanding of complex environmental problems. One area of particular importance involves the linkages between climate change, biodiversity, agriculture, pollution, and other aspects of the environment (Ayensu et al. 2000). The critical nature of this nexus was identified several years ago, leading to the establishment of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a process that involves a wide range of stakeholders and several hundred scientists worldwide (see www.millenniumassessment.org). The goals of MA are to provide a global assessment of ecosystems, the services they provide, and their importance for The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development