The Biodiversity Foundation of the Ministry of the Environment, Rural and Marine Affairs, and the Autonomous University of Madrid have signed an agreement to carry out the project “Assessment of Millennium Ecosystems in Spain”. Through this initiative, it is intended, on the one hand, to diagnose and evaluate the environmental services of ecosystems in Spain, and on the other, to contribute to the compliance and development of the Law on Natural Heritage and Biodiversity.

This initiative is a powerful instrument to identify priority actions that help to sustainably manage Spanish ecosystems. It will provide planning and management tools and provide future perspectives on the consequences of decisions that affect the flow of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem services. It will also help in political decision-making as it will serve to show the costs and benefits of the use of natural capital as a result of the different policies that are promoted at the state or regional level.

In addition, this project will disseminate in Spain the most important conclusions of the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Programme and will identify and define, in socio-ecological terms, the natural capital of Spain. Scenarios will be created that allow us to appreciate the consequences of decisions that affect terrestrial, marine and continental aquatic ecosystems, considered as natural capital. It will also identify response options to achieve human development and environmental sustainability goals; propose response options to environmental risk and degradation; to provide useful information for the preparation of the Spanish Inventory of Natural Heritage and Biodiversity, and to design a System of Reference Indicators within the framework of this Inventory.

In 2001, the United Nations launched the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Programme. Its purpose was, on the one hand, to generate solid, scientifically validated information, so that managers, politicians and the general public are aware of the consequences that changes in the planet’s ecosystems have on human well-being and, on the other hand, to offer options to assimilate these changes.

The Programme was based on the empirical reality that, depending on their level of conservation, ecosystems provide human beings with a series of services (provisioning, regulatory or cultural) that are fundamental to their well-being. That is why there is an interdependence between human health and ecosystem health, so that the conditions for a healthy and safe human life depend on the sustainability of ecosystems. It also serves to meet the demands for scientific information of the Conventions on Biological Diversity, the Convention to Combat Desertification, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, the Convention on Climate Change or the Convention on Migratory Species.

The Millennium Ecosystems Programme has spanned local, national, regional and global scales. The evaluation has been carried out so far in 40 case studies in as many countries on all continents of the planet.

On the other hand, the recently approved Law on Natural Heritage and Biodiversity includes in its article 9 the obligation to create a Spanish Inventory of Natural Heritage and Biodiversity of which will be part, among other information, the Catalogue of Habitats in Danger of Disappearing, understood as ecosystems. Likewise, for the creation and development of this Inventory, the law provides for the establishment of a System of indicators that expresses the results of the research in a simple way, so this project aims to collaborate in the fulfillment of these legal commitments.