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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.