摘要：In spite of the growing awareness of the importance of ecosystems and biodiversity to human welfare, loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystems still continue on a large scale. Fundamental changes are needed in the way biodiversity, ecosystems and their services are viewed and valued by society. A major difficulty is that many ecosystem services [1] are (mixed) public goods, and use levels are therefore difficult to regulate, even when they are at or near the point of exhaustion. Although many people benefit from ecosystem services, individuals or groups usually have insufficient incentives to maintain ecosystems for continued provisioning of services. For example, open access fisheries provide valuable harvests but often suffer from over-exploitation that leads to declines in fish populations and lowered future harvests. The problems of management and governance of ecosystems stem from both poor information and institutional failures. In some cases, there is a basic lack of knowledge about the contribution of ecosystem processes and biodiversity to human welfare and how human actions lead to environmental change with impacts on human welfare. In other cases institutions, notably markets provide the wrong incentives. These two types of failures, and the complex dynamics between the ecology-economy interfaces, often lead to large scale and persistent degradation of the natural environment and accelerating loss of ecosystem services and biodiversity. Given the large scale of human activities on the planet, we have reached the point where the cumulative losses in ecosystem services are forcing us to rethink how we incorporate the value of these services into societal decision-making. In this paper we are presenting the current state of knowledge on the relationships between biodiversity, ecosystems and ecosystem services and we made an analysis of the economic implications of the loss of ecosystem services
关键词：importance of ecosystems; human welfare; relationships between biodiversity-ecosystems and ecosystem ;services; economic implications
