Essay on MA: Assessing Ecosystem Services for Human Well-Being

Introduction

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) entails multiple international scientific assessments aimed at meeting human needs as directed by the users like Ramsar and other conventions (Board, 2005). The evaluation focuses on the ecosystem services alongside their implications of contemporary status. The services also ensure the well-being of human beings as they overlook the trends of the services and ensuring that no value depreciation is witnessed. The act is possible since the trends give an accurate analysis of the ongoing fluctuations of services so that an intervention by the related bodies can be sought when there is a drop in the efficiency of certain services. The 2005 MA list of products and services that the bodies would finalize included a data catalog, technical assessment reports that originated from the conditions, responses, scenarios, and an array of sub-global assessments (Board, 2005). Besides, the summaries of decision-makers were another significant product that the assessment would scrutinize.

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Services

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) clarifies the benefits that people accrue from the entire ecosystem. The services entail provisioning that deals with the availability of goods, water, wood, and genetic resources. Another primary service of the MA is regulating that focuses on climate regulation, disease regulation alongside flood regulation. It forms a very important area since the environmental condition is among the primary determinants of individuals' well-being. There exist cultural services that emphasize on the non-material benefits that complement human life in every ecosystem. Also, the MA overlooks supporting services that are required to produce other ecosystem services that form the basic requirements for other services to work successfully. Some of the supporting services include soil formation, nutrient cycling, and primary production. The success of all the MA services is dependent on the availability of the supporting services.

Regulating Services

The major focus of the research will base on regulating as one of the major services. They entail the benefits accrued from controlling the ecosystem processes. For instance, ensuring the safety of the individuals and crops in an ecosystem require quality air in the atmosphere. Regulation, therefore, focuses on maintaining the air quality in the atmosphere by controlling activities like the usage of chemicals in the environment (Dobbs, Martinez-Harms & Kendal, 2017). Such activities influence various aspects of air quality hence affecting the ecosystem in various aspects.

Similarly, the services focus on climate regulation. Ecosystems pose an influence on climate in local and global dimensions. For example, the climatic conditions that cause changes in land cover at local levels facilitate precipitation that in turn affect the environmental temperature into more adverse conditions. On the other hand, at global scales, ecosystems have significant roles like in the case of greenhouse gas emissions and sequestering activities (Dobbs, Martinez-Harms & Kendal, 2017). The regulating body must then take an active role in maintaining the climatic variations to avoid further deterioration at the expense of human well-being. The success of human activities depends on the underlying climatic conditions in an ecosystem.

Water regulation forms another important regulating service by the ecosystem. This entails understanding the timings and analyzing the magnitudes of actions like runoff, flooding, along with aquifer recharge. The phenomena are directly dependent on the land cover variations thus regulation is necessary for controlling them to create an enabling environment for human existence (Dobbs, Martinez-Harms & Kendal, 2017). The changes can cause fluctuations in the potential of storing water by the systems like in the cases where croplands are replacing forests or replacement of forests with urban areas. Such activities lower the distribution of water on particular environments which in turn affects the ecosystem in adverse ways. The land activities in such areas, therefore, reduce hence exposing human beings to more adverse living conditions. The service is necessary for food security and other significant economic activities in line with farming.

Regulating also controls erosions by ensuring soil retention and preventing landslides as they maintain an intensive vegetative cover. Protecting the vegetative cover ensures mitigates the instances of erosions and landslides. The two phenomena pose negative impacts on the wellbeing of human beings since they experience the overall effect of such activities. Erosions make lands less productive since the rich layers get swept away. Thus, the agricultural activities in such regions drop causing starvation. Controlling soil erosion is, therefore, an important regulating role played by the MA in ensuring human comfort-ability.

Regulating also constitutes to biological control. The changes in the ecosystem interfere with the frequency of infestation by agricultural pests and diseases. Crop pests affect the rate of pollination which determines the value of the farming activities in different regions. The availability of crop diseases also affects certain plants necessary for the thriving of certain regions in the world. For instance, the coastal ecosystems like mangroves and coral reefs are necessary to protect the coastal lines and beauty (Dobbs, Martinez-Harms & Kendal, 2017). The common phenomena in regions like hurricanes and large waves do not cause much damage to the coastal lines due to the presence of the plants. Therefore, ensuring there availability and protection is a significant action to maintain the wellbeing of the human within the coastal regions.

Threats

Even though the MA is trying to ensure an effective international scientific assessment of its services, it has been difficult to devise effective environmental policy (Finlayson, 2018). It is because most of the information used by the body is not based on sound scientific information and the primary advances regarding data soliciting which the MA has made lacks comprehensive global assessment. Thus, there have been big gaps in the existing knowledge by the body which threatens the assessment policies that the body has devised to approach the shortcomings. The resulting threat to the affirmation is that the organized Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which is the primary global collaborative effort, cannot affect the health of our planet in giving a related response to regulating services.

Another threat is that the variations in the ecosystem affect both humans and other numerous species since the approaches that the MA set for the ecosystem interferes with the intrinsic value of the creatures (Finlayson, 2018). It, therefore, threatens sound ecosystem management since it must follow the procedures of addressing utilitarian links of individuals in an ecosystem to come up with clear decision-making processes.

Conclusion

On balance, the reports from the analysis revealed both the value of wetlands and the extent of declines that were taking place at certain points. Thus, the assessment provided by MA is necessary since without applying it correctly, the conventions would not identify the significance of maintaining the ecosystem to achieve the various human needs as defined in the Millennium Development Goals (Finlayson, 2018). The directives of the phenomenon give a clear framework of managing various development programs within the regions hence meeting the goal of ensuring human well-being at all costs.

References

Board, M. A. (2005). Millennium ecosystem assessment. Washington, DC: New Island, 13. Retrieved from http://www.pik-potsdam.de/avec/peyresq2003/

Dobbs, C., Martinez-Harms, M. J., & Kendal, D. (2017). Ecosystem services. In Routledge handbook of urban forestry (pp. 51-64). Routledge. Retrieved from https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/

Finlayson, C. M. (2018). Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 42. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Max_Finlayson/publication/308704660_Millennium_Ecosystem_Assessment/links/