The UK Government has published its response to the Environmental Audit Committee’s report on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. The EAC recommended that the UK conduct a national ecosystem assessment. However, the Government has said that:

We must take into account the risks of duplication of resources and opportunities for making use of existing assessment processes. There may prove to be value in a national assessment which pulls together existing initiatives for a more coherent approach to monitoring the status of and trends in ecosystem services, and predicting future impacts of drivers of change, but we would need to establish whether and how such an assessment would be useful to inform our policy and decision making in the future.

Would a national MA duplicate effort or enhance decision making?

For more on ecosystem services, read the recently published Parliamentary Office of Science and Technologies POSTnote on the topic.

The IPCC’s AR4 Working Group on mitigation has published its summary for policymakers. Land use, land use change, and forestry (LULUCF) is the key area of interest to the ecological community. Between 1970 and 2004 direct green house emissions from LULUCF, not including removals, increased by 40%. Current mitigation technologies and practices highlighted by the IPCC in this area included:

• Improved crop and grazing land management to increase soil carbon storage
• Restoration of cultivated peaty soils and degraded lands
• Improved farming practices (manure and fertiliser management)
• Dedicated energy crops to replace fossil fuel use
• Increased forest cover

The report highlighted that greater research may lead to:

• Tree species improvements to increase biomass productivity and carbon sequestration
• Improved remote sensing technologies for analysis of vegetation/ soil carbon sequestration potential and mapping land use change