Meeting dates: 13-15 September 2023
Venue: Bilbao, Spain (hybrid meeting)
Ecosystem services provide the critical conditions and processes through which natural ecosystems and the species that inhabit them support the survival of the human race. After more than 20 years since the first Earth Summit though, the vast majority of the world's nations declared that human actions were dismantling the Earth's ecosystems at a worrying rate.
In the field of marine social-ecological systems, ecosystem services are being increasingly altered as a result of anthropogenic pressures to which they are subjected. In this way, the role of ICES is key in promoting the scientific cooperation necessary for the maintenance of ecosystem services, in turn ensuring the welfare of present and future generations.
By using different quantitative and qualitative models, WGRMES will allow the scientific community, stakeholders, and Member States to estimate how policies, plans and programmes can affect multiple ecosystem services and different management objectives by guiding selection of the best alternatives.
The group's objectives are:
- To increase the scientific capacity to design data collection networks and methodologies in order to analyze the ecological, economic, social, and institutional dimensions of ecosystem services
- To encourage international cooperation to better understand the spatial and social distribution of ecosystem services
- To incentive the study of the ecological, economic, and social factors underlying synergies and trade-offs under global change
- To support international efforts to identify the effects of regime shifts on ecosystem services
- To effectively design mechanisms from science to decision-making process to find the best alternative strategies for the use of ecosystem services by governments, the scientific community, and stakeholders.
WGRMES knowledge repositories
The group has developed two new knowledge repositories:
The repositories are the result of the ICES Science Fund project Social transformation of marine social-ecological systems.