Linking marine environmental status with the provision of ecosystem services and human benefits.
Supervisors: Ángel Borja, Maria C. Uyarra (AZTI)
Marine ecosystem services provide multiple benefits and hold significant economic value; however, the capacity of the marine environment to provide ecosystem services is being affected by various anthropogenic pressures. To ensure proper environmental conditions and the well-being of human, it is necessary to sustainably manage the marine environment, with an indispensable need to study the functioning of marine ecosystem services. In Europe, the most accepted framework for studying ecosystem services is CICES (Common International Classification for Ecosystem Services). Within this framework, the “CICES cascade” is proposed, which makes links between the marine environment and the socio-economic system, through the provision of ecosystem services and the benefits and economic value of these.

In this context the hypothesis of this study is that healthy oceans (= healthy marine environment, in the CICES cascade) will supply more and better ecosystem services, resulting in socio-economic benefits for humans, and that this can be tested by applying the CICES conceptual cascade to a real case study. The study was divided in two parts: (i) The review and compilation of the CICES cascade component indicators, for three ecosystem service examples (provisioning: wild fish for nutrition; regulation: carbon sequestration by marine environments; cultural: recreational marine mammal watching), together with the analysis of the number of indicators and the match of the classification undertaken by the authors in the literature and the CICES proposal; and (ii) the application of the CICES cascade to a practical case study (anchovy fishery in the Bay of Biscay).

The main conclusion for the first part of the study was that it is necessary to develop a standardized classification and understanding of the marine ecosystem services. Several confusions exist according to the terminology and the different interpretations of the flow between the environment and the socio-economic system, making the study and management of ecosystem services more complicated. Regarding the second part of the study, the hypothesis was demonstrated for the case study, since the links between the cascade steps exist, and a “healthy” environment results in sustainable supply of ecosystem service and benefits. However, the relationships between the cascade components could be much more complex, if several species, components, and indicators are considered at the same time, as well as if we consider not only several cumulative human pressures, but also the climate change effect, in all cases under non-linear relationships.