RATHER than offer a definitive 鈥渢o do list鈥� for policy makers, the MA scientists have set out a range of 74 possible types of action and evaluated how promising they seem to be.
Many are familiar chants from the environmental soapbox: eliminating wasteful and destructive agricultural subsidies, paying landowners to maintain habitats, taxing goods to reflect environmental costs, and making ecosystem health a specific policy goal. But it is not too late for steps like these to reverse the decline in the ecosystem services that support life.
The MA looked at four scenarios. Two involved global planning, while the other two took a narrow, local view of dealing with environmental problems. Each of these was then paired with either proactive or reactive decision making: wait for a problem to arise and then do something about it. Tellingly, in only one scenario did ecosystem services continue to decline across the board and that was the one which most resembles our present system of little global planning or proactive decision making.
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In the other three, natural ecosystems and at least some of the services they provide improved over a 45-year timescale. 鈥淐onsistently, if decision making is proactive the outcome is better,鈥� says Jane Lubchenco of Oregon State University, who worked on the assessment.
More than anything though, ecologists hope the sheer scope of the project will spur policy makers into taking ecosystem degradation more seriously. 鈥淚 hope this will provide a big cudgel to beat those who have consistently denied that any of this is happening,鈥� says Stuart Pimm, an ecologist at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina. 鈥淚t will focus policy makers on doing something about it instead of trying to embrace a few lunatic contrarians who believe that nothing is happening.鈥�
Such a shift in attitude cannot come too soon, says Lubchenco. 鈥淭he sooner the response the more options are available,鈥� she says.
