Achieving Environmental Security: Ecosystem Services and Human Welfare

The world's ecosystems are at increasing risk of rapid degradation and collapse, as documented in recently published accounts by the United Nations Environment Programme. Many societies are either unaware of the key value that diversity of animals, plants and other life-forms play in the role of healthy and functioning ecosystems and sustained human livelihoods, or are failing to develop policies and strategies for their protection. The challenges we face today are to recognize and anticipate change in ecsystem services in all of its forms and to appreciate human and societal dynamic impacts. To solve these challenging opportunities that mask themselves as insoluble problems, a gathering of renowned scientists from Africa, Europe, India, North America, th Middle East, North Africa and the Russian Federation, under the sponsorship of the NATO Science for Peace and Security Program, EPA Ecosystem Services Research Program, the United Nations Environment Programme, the Desert Research Institute and the Pell enter for International Relations and Public Policy, provides an extended exchange of views and experience. Collectively, they focused on ecosystem services in relation to human welfare, peace and security. This volume represents an extraordinary collectie effort to define, design and deliver ecosystem services for the benefit of humanity. Achieving Environmental Security: Ecosystem Services and Human Welfare reflects NATO's "third dimension," which goes beyond cooperation in political and defense fields o encourage cooperation related to civil emergency planning and scientific and environmental cooperation and to focus on stability, sustainability and solidarity among peoples, states and regions, to understand, appreciate and incorporate ecosystem servics into the way we live our lives.