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The European Union (EU) Horizon 2020 Coordination and Support Action ESMERALDA aimed at developing guidance and a flexible methodology for Mapping and Assessment of Ecosystems and their Services (MAES) to support the EU member states in the implementation of the EU Biodiversity Strategy’s Target 2 Action 5. ESMERALDA’s key tasks included network creation, stakeholder engagement, enhancing ecosystem services mapping and assessment methods across various spatial scales and value domains, work in case studies and support of EU member states in MAES implementation. Thus ESMERALDA aimed at integrating various project outcomes around four major strands: i) Networking, ii) Policy, iii) Research and iv) Application. The objective was to provide guidance for integrated ecosystem service mapping and assessment that can be used for sustainable decision-making in policy, business, society, practice and science at EU, national and regional levels. This article presents the overall ESMERALDA approach of integrating the above-mentioned project components and outcomes and provides an overview of how the enhanced methods were applied and how they can be used to support MAES implementation in the EU member states. Experiences with implementing such a large pan-European Coordination and Support Action in the context of EU policy are discussed and recommendations for future actions are given.

There is currently a lack of representative, systematic and harmonised greenhouse gas (GHG) observations covering the variety of natural and human-altered biomes that occur in Africa. This impedes the long-term assessment of the drivers of climate change, in addition to their impacts and feedback loops at the continental scale, but also limits our understanding of the contribution of the African continent to the global carbon (C) cycle. Given the current and projected transformation of socio-economic conditions in Africa (i.e. the increasing trend of urbanisation and population growth) and the adverse impacts of climate change, the development of a GHG research infrastructure (RI) is needed to support the design of suitable mitigation and adaptation strategies required to assure food, fuel, nutrition and economic security for the African population. This paper presents the initial results of the EU-African SEACRIFOG project, which aims to design a GHG observation RI for Africa. The first stages of this project included the identification and engagement of key stakeholders, the definition of the conceptual monitoring framework and an assessment of existing infrastructural capacity. Feedback from stakeholder sectors was obtained through three Stakeholder Consultation Workshops held in Kenya, Ghana and Zambia. Main concerns identified were data quality and accessibility, the need for capacity building and networking among the scientific community, and adaptation to climate change, which was confirmed to be a priority for Africa. This feedback in addition to input from experts in the atmospheric, terrestrial and oceanic thematic areas, facilitated the selection of a set of 'essential variables' that need to be measured in the future environmental RI. An inventory of 47 existing and planned networks across the continent allowed for an assessment of the current RIs needs and gaps in Africa. Overall, the development of a harmonised and standardised pan-African RI will serve to address the continent's primary societal and scientific challenges through a potential cross-domain synergy among existing and planned networks at regional, continental and global scales.

Natural ecosystems are disappearing at an increasing rate, and disappearing along with them is the immense biodiversity they contain. In addition to direct factors influencing the conversion of natural ecosystems to agriculture, international trade and consumption of products in wealthy countries have also been implicated as drivers of ecosystem change. We used quantitatively advanced methods to connect loss of potential net primary production (NPP) in global biodiversity hotspots to its ultimate driver – final consumption (eg consumption by households and government) – and identified the origins of agricultural products through global supply chains to quantify spatial impacts on the potential photosynthetic production of natural ecosystems. Using embodied potential NPP equivalents, we estimated the footprint of final consumption on ecosystems in the most threatened biodiversity hotspots. Our results contribute to the identification of conservation priorities from the perspective of consumer responsibility.

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Ecosystem services, defined as benefits provided by ecosystem functioning to society, are essential to human well‐being. Due to global environmental change and related anthropogenic drivers, ecosystems are often degraded, which hinders the delivery of ecosystem services. This study aims to quantify the impacts of land use and climate change on two regulating ecosystem services—carbon sequestration and water purification in terms of nitrogen retention in the Czech Republic. While employing approaches of scenarios and modeling, we illustrate current and potential future status of these ecosystem services. Our results show that among the ecosystem change drivers, one of the dominant domestic land‐use change of ALARM BAMBU (Business‐As‐Might‐Be‐Usual) scenario is change of arable land and grassland to forest area that increases by 4.5% in 2080 compared to 2000. The results of ecosystem service modeling based on BAMBU scenario for the years 2050 and 2080 indicate that the highest yearly carbon sequestration rate occurred in 2000–2050, reaching 640 GgC·yr−1, 2000–2080 shows decline in this regulating service by 16%. Average nitrogen leaching to water streams reached 0.75 kgN·ha−1·yr−1 for BAMBU in 2050 scenario and 0.80 kgN·ha−1·yr−1 for BAMBU in 2080 scenario as a result of decreasing nitrogen load, which suggested a decrease in nitrogen pollution compared to 2000. Since ecosystem services have not been extensively mainstreamed into research and policies in eastern European countries, we aim to contribute to improvement of knowledge on current status and potential future pathways of the provision of regulating ecosystem services in the Czech Republic.