Biodiversity, Ecosystems and Human wellbeing

Recent developments arising form the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment have highlighted the role that environmental management, including the preservation of biodiversity can play in human wellbeing.

Professor Mace will begin by reviewing ways that we can measure and track changes in biodiversity and then ask how useful these measures are for environmental assessments related to human wellbeing. There are emerging conceptual frameworks to link biodiversity to the benefits to people that flow from healthy ecosystems. However they are complicated by many interactions and feedbacks and by the different relationships across spatial and temporal scales.
She will outline some new approaches to these linkages and consider ways that they can be implemented at local to global scales. This analysis reveals many significant findings for both research and policy which should form the basis of new, interdisciplinary work in the area.