The term “ecosystem services” was popularized at the beginning of the 21st century within the first major global project to evaluate the benefits provided by nature—the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA). This initiative, commissioned by the United Nations Secretary-General in 2000, Kofi Annan, aimed to assess the consequences of ecosystem changes for human well-being, thus highlighting a scientific basis for necessary actions toward the conservation and sustainable use of these systems and their contributions to global well-being.
This evaluation involved over 1360 researchers from 95 countries worldwide and drew attention to multiple global considerations regarding the necessity of balancing the satisfaction of human needs from natural sources with the minimization of the costs and negative effects of degrading the ecosystems that support these needs, as well as stopping the irreversible loss of biodiversity. The reports and materials produced by the scientific community during this program represent today the historical framework for most evaluations in the field.
The official definition and an initial categorization were expressed in the report “Ecosystems and Human Well-being – A Framework for Assessment” (September 2003), stating: “Ecosystem services are the benefits people obtain from ecosystems. These include provisioning services such as food and water; regulating services such as regulation of floods, drought, land degradation, and disease; supporting services such as soil formation and nutrient cycling; and cultural services such as recreational, spiritual, religious and other nonmaterial benefits.”
Subsequent definitions supplement this by noting: “the important benefits for human beings that arise from healthily functioning ecosystems, notably production of oxygen, soil genesis, and water detoxification,” and “ecosystem services represent the direct and indirect contribution of ecosystems to human well-being.”
Global and European projects and initiatives continue to refine the methodology for evaluating ecosystem services, strongly linked to natural capital and their effects on human society’s development, ensuring better coordination with the Sustainable Development Goals 2030 (SDGs), replacing the MEA’s correlation with the UN Millenium Development Goals, which were replaced by SDGs at the Paris Conference in 2015. The data used and the scenarios proposed in this thesis are based on the following contemporary programs (TEEB, IPBES, CICES, MAES, WAVES, SEAS, IUCN-CEM-ES, SGAN, ESP, etc.), which, although not fully finalized at the time of the study, already offered working deliverables, particularly the European evaluation framework, MAES. Furthermore, representative European projects include OPERAs, OpenNESS, ESMERALDA, EKLIPSE, ThinkNature, and in Romania, the MAES Romania and ValueEcoServ projects, detailed at the end of this sub-chapter.
