RE : There is more to Nature’s Contributions to People than Ecosystem Services – A response to de Groot et al.

We share many of the views of de Groot et al. on the relevance of ecosystem services (ES) and the constructive role they have played in highlighting the importance of nature to people. Here we aim to further clarify how the concept of Nature’s Contribution to People (NCP) contributes to science and policy.It was not the aim of our article to review the literature on ecosystem services (ES). The point of our article was to explain the concept of NCP not to review the extensive ES literature. We are in full agreement that the influence of ES has been long and rich, from its first mention in the peer-reviewed literature (1) to the present. As explicitly stated in our articles (2, 3) and further clarified in our figure S1, the IPBES approach owes much to the influence of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) (4). The NCP framing has a number of elements that were present in the MA, as well as new elements.Ecosystem services are a subset of NCP, but there is more to NCP than ES. Beyond apparent similarities in definitions (e.g. services = contributions in some cases), the ES and NCP framings are different, with NCP being epistemologically, ontologically and methodologically more pluralistic. ES are part of NCP, that is, the ES approach represents an important subset of ways to understand nature’s diverse contributions to people.