Human Impacts on Ecosystem Functioning

Catalog description

Explores our current understanding of how humans are impacting the functioning of ecosystems and how changes in ecosystems would affect provisioning of ecosystem services and ultimately human well-being. The two primary drivers of ecosystem change are growth of the human population and increased consumption per capita. These drivers affect the Earth's cycles of carbon, nitrogen and water, as well as regional and global-scale changes in biodiversity and climate. Includes an in-depth discussion of scenarios for the next 50 and 100 years, which articulate costs and benefits of alternative development pathways in terms of climate change, food production, clean water and biodiversity. Scenarios of change in biodiversity lead to the topic of the consequences of biodiversity change for the functioning of ecosystems from the point of view of their productivity and stability. Human activities have disrupted several biogeochemical cycles including nitrogen and carbon cycles.