Download Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions

Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions
Copenhagen, 10-12 March 2009
Climate Change and Ecosystem Services
11 March 2009
The impacts of global warming on biotic systems are already in evidence and the predictions
are that as the climate continues to be altered we will see increasingly dramatic
reconfigurations of the earth’s ecosystems and their functioning, and hence their capacity to
deliver ecosystem services. Ecosystem services are the end of a delivery system that flows
starting from the diversity of organisms, their abundances, characteristics and
configurations. These in turn, along with the physical environment, determine the nature
and tempo of ecosystem processes or their functioning that ultimately controls the delivery
of ecosystem services.
In this symposium session we examine these linkages with a focus on a variety of crucial
services extending from how climate change will affect biodiversity directly and
subsequently to how provisioning services such as water supply and fisheries will be
affected. We then look at two important regulating services that ecosystems provide:
climate regulation and disease regulation and conclude with a view of how changes in the
delivery of cultural services will be altered and how these may expect to entrain societal
responses to these changes.