Impacts of ecosystem services and their assessments on policy

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.