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A new paradigm is necessary to describe how ecosystems and biodiversity are incorporated into societal decision-making, where natural resources are currently undervalued, and sometimes neglected. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the TEEB initiative (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, 2008, 2009) gave political acknowledgement to the concept of ecosystem services and advocate for a better understanding of the links between biodiversity, ecosystems services and human well-being. Recent data and assessments (e.g. SEBI2010 - Streamlining European Biodiversity Indicators, Art. 17 reporting in the Habitats Directive, Red Lists of the International Union for Conservation of Nature) show that biodiversity continues to be under serious pressure and that, while some progress has been made, the EU 2010 target has not been met. Under conservative assumptions covering only terrestrial ecosystems, the COPI (The Cost of Policy Inaction, 2008) report estimated that the loss of welfare in 2050 from the cumulative loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services could be equal to 7% of global GDP. The most recent communication from the EU Commission on biodiversity (COM(2010) 4 final) recognises that the frequent undervaluation of ecosystem services is a significant cause underlying today’s biodiversity crisis. The ecosystem service concept is also one of the pillars of the planned Commission’s Blueprint for the future of European Waters addressing the environmental pathway of vulnerability of water ecosystems and the need to balance multiple uses of water. Assimilation of this concept calls for the economic valuation of biodiversity and ecosystem services and its incorporation into policy making and implementation. This implies putting biodiversity and ecosystems at the centre of other sectoral policies, integrating them into the spatial planning for water and land, and making explicit the costs and benefits of ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss. The BIOMES Action aims to provide the scientific basis for this integration of policies, with a focus on mapping ecosystem services, developing robust modelling approaches that evaluate ecosystem dynamics and simulations of future scenarios, and providing support to EU nature and water policies which have ecosystem-based management targets.

The BIOMES Action will strengthen ongoing research on biodiversity and ecosystem assessment, focus on anticipatory research on water ecosystems and improve the capacity to model ecosystem dynamics at the interface of aquatic and terrestrial environments. Scientific topics that will be addressed by the Action include the role of biodiversity in underpinning ecosystem services, the adaptation of ecosystems and biodiversity to climate change and other drivers of biodiversity loss (e.g. alien species, nutrient pollution), and the spatial function of green and blue infrastructure. The work on ecosystem service mapping will continue in 2011, delivering European scaled maps of ecosystem services which are essentially based on spatial indicators for ecosystem services that are statistically coupled to land cover and land use patterns. The focus is on defining indicators and mapping ecosystem services in biophysical terms and on the link with economic valuation in order to develop science-based methodologies for the assessment of the costs and benefits to humans and ecosystems of conservation activities. Building on existing model chains (bio-geochemical and hydrological), the Action will continue working on ecosystem modelling for the implementation of an eco-hydrological approach to the assessment of impacts on the river-floodplains-estuarine-coastal continuum. New focus will be on modelling the services provided by these ecosystems and the identification of tipping points.
The Action will support Commission initiatives in the development of a post 2010 biodiversity policy framework to help set priorities within the field of biodiversity conservation in the EU. The Action will partner policy DGs to implement targets of the Commission’s Blueprint for the future of European Waters: it will provide support to EU Directives protecting the ecosystem functions of inland and marine waters (Water Framework Directive-WFD and Marine Strategy Framework Directive-MSFD) with a focus on intercalibration for the definition of good ecological status, assessment of balance among multiple water uses and demands, improving the integration of water related policies into other legislation (for example legislation on biodiversity, climate change, energy), and carry out research on how aquatic ecosystems adapt to climate change.
The BIOMES Action will contribute to the JRC Strategy on Climate Change, Maritime Affairs and to GMES. It will collaborate and benefit from interactions with other JRC Actions (MAPLE, MONDE, PROCAS, ENSURE, DESERT, WQM) in light of the need for strengthened cooperation for the achievement of the 2013 milestones of the JRC Thematic Area 3, namely the strategic scientific objectives on “Prospects on Water”, “Science for a stronger biodiversity policy”, and “Integrated modelling platform for sustainability assessment”.


International activities
* Support the establishment of the IPBES (Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services); collaboration with TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity), an international network of ecologists and economists under the patronage of the Commission, and with UNEP in the assessment of the economic costs of biodiversity decline and the costs and benefits of actions to reduce these losses.
* A Mediterranean focus in the context of the Commission Environment Strategy for the Mediterranean (COM(2006) 475), the European Neighbourhood Policy and the Barcelona Convention, involving Candidate and Neighbouring Countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea. Team up with MEDPOL, with the European Federation of Coastal Lagoons and with the European Technology Platform for Water (WssTP) for demonstration cases in Mediterranean coastal regions.
* Coordination of European networks of competent authorities and national laboratories from EU27 Member States and Candidate Countries involved in the Water Framework Directive Intercalibration and in the Marine Strategy Framework Directive.