Ecosystem services—science, policy and practice: Introduction to the journal and the inaugural issue

The rootsIn the wake of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a study involving over 1300 scientists around the world under the umbrella of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), published in 2005, a large number of initiatives were developed from global to local scales, and across the science, policy, nongovernment and business communities, which addressed the messages and questions launched by the MA.One initiative stands out, as it involved the greater political powers of this world: the so-called Potsdam Initiative.The Environment Ministers of the G8 countries and of Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa, the European Commissioner responsible for the Environment and senior officials from the United Nations and the IUCN (The World Conservation Union) met in Potsdam in March 2007.The meeting resulted among others in the announcement of a course of action for the conservation of biological diversity and for climate protection: ''The clear message of this meeting is that we must jointly strengthen our endeavours to curb the massive loss of biological diversity.It was agreed that we must no longer delete nature's database, which holds massive potential for economic and social development'' (BMU-Pressedienst no.077/07; Berlin, 17.03.2007).The ''Potsdam Initiative-Biological Diversity 2010'' set in motion specific activities for protection and sustainable use of biodiversity.The first of a list of 10 decisions under this initiative reads as follows: ''The economic significance of the global loss of biological diversity'': We will initiate the process of analysing the global economic benefit of biological diversity, the costs of the loss of biodiversity and the failure to take protective measures versus the costs of effective conservation.This particular decision was subsequently turned into a research program, which could be considered as the economic extension of the MA.The acronym chosen was TEEB: ''The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity''.The initiative was developed by the German Government and the European Commission, but joined by several other countries and sheltered under the umbrella of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).If TEEB had to have started from scratch, there would probably not have been much to show for at the 10th Conference of Parties (CoP) of the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) in Nagoya, Japan, in October 2010.Luckily, the study leader, Pavan Sukhdev, could harvest from a large amount of work done on the economics of ecosystems, their services and biodiversity in the years since the mid-1960s (for an overview see Braat and De Groot, 2012, in this issue).