3. Marine Ecosystem Services

Marine ecosystems deliver a number of goods and services, such as food, recreation areas, raw materials or active substances for medicine, which are important to fulfill basic needs and to support the well-being of humans. The concept of ecosystem services is useful to get a better understanding of the benefits humans obtain from marine ecosystems and to improve their communication. There have been several attempts to refine ecosystem services categories in order to establish a common classification system which could simplify the incorporation of ecosystem services into everyday policy-decisions-making and economic accounting systems. The concept of ecosystem services plays an important role in the evaluation of costs and benefits that are associated with the protection of natural capital or ecosystems. But the valuation of natural capital has limitations and pitfalls. Besides the monetary value of marine ecosystem services there are also strong non-economic reasons to protect marine biodiversity from threats from anthropogenic pressures and to preserve it for current and future generations.