Introduction to the Special Issue on Ecosystem Services and the Law

The importance of natural ecosystems to people and their societies has been articulated by scientists since the early 1960s. From this emerged the concept of ecosystem services in the 1970s and 1980s that began to categorize ecosystem services, value and monetarize them, against a backdrop of growing global degradation of natural ecosystems. The concept of ecosystem services has given rise to new inter-disciplinary fields (e.g. ecological economics, bioeconomics, and environmental management), which seek to provide knowledge on how the well-being of humans, which is dependent on ecosystem services from nature, can be maintained. The term has also helped connect ecological complexity and dynamics to human needs and wants, as ecosystem services fundamentally underpin human health, wellbeing and prosperity