The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) is an international work programme that was designed to meet the needs of decision makers and the public for scientific information concerning the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and options for responding to those changes.
The MA was launched by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in June 2001 and was completed in 2005. It will help meet assessment needs of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Convention to Combat Desertification, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, and the Convention on Migratory Species, as well as needs of other users in the private sector and civil society. If the MA proves to be useful to its stakeholders, it is anticipated that an assessment process modeled on the MA will be repeated every 5–10 years and that ecosystem assessments will be regularly conducted at national or sub-national scales.
The MA focuses on ecosystem services (the benefits people obtain from ecosystems), how changes in ecosystem services have affected human well-being, how ecosystem changes may affect people in future decades, and response options that might be adopted at local, national, or global scales to improve ecosystem management and thereby contribute to human well-being and poverty alleviation. The specific issues being addressed by the assessment have been defined through consultation with the MA users.
The MA is intended to be used:
- to identify priorities for action
- as a benchmark for future assessments
- as a framework and source of tools for assessment, planning, and management
- to gain foresight concerning the consequences of decisions affecting ecosystems
- to identify response options to achieve human development and sustainability goals
- to help build individual and institutional capacity to undertake integrated ecosystem assessments and act on the findings
- to guide future research.
The website contains details of the methodology for the study and the various reports making up the study’s final outputs. Also listed are the various partners and contributors to the project.
The site also has prominent links to the World Data Center for Biodiversity and Ecology which provides access to data used in the assessment.