Healthy, thriving and resilient nature is at the core of healthy lifestyles, thriving economies and resilient societies. Europe’s ecosystems - from forests, rivers and lakes to farmland, urban green spaces and soils – form a safety net that protects the region from extreme climate impacts and provides essential ecosystem services such as crop pollination, soil creation, carbon sequestration and storage. However, Europe’s ecosystems are under increasing pressure.
The EU Ecosystem Assessment brings together for the first time EU-wide and commonly agreed data sets that can be used to assess the state and trends of ecosystems and their services as well as the pressures and their trends they are exposed to. This is particularly important to understand where and how much ecosystems are degraded and threatened so as to guide priority and cost-effective restoration efforts.
The assessment provides an analysis of the pressures and the condition of terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems and their services using a single, comparable methodology based on European data relative to the baseline year 2010. The assessment covers the total land area of the EU and the UK as well as the marine regions.