Biodiversity and ecosystem services: The Nature Index for Norway Iulie Aslaksen a,n , Signe Nybø b , Erik Framstad b , Per Arild Garnåsjordet a , Olav Skarpaas b a Statistics Norway, Norway b Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA), Norway article info Article history: Received 7 July 2014 Received in revised form 5 November 2014 Accepted 8 November 2014 Keywords: Biodiversity measurement Biodiversity indicators Biodiversity policy Ecosystem services Nature Index Valuation abstract Valuation of ecosystem services has been advocated as a tool for communicating the importance of nature and biodiversity to policy makers. The complexity of the relationships between ecosystem functions and the biodiversity that supports them challenges conceptualization of ecosystem services and calls for comprehensive ecological frameworks as basis for valuation and policy. In this article, we discuss relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem services in the context of the Nature Index for Norway, recently developed as a biodiversity measurement framework. We suggest supplementing the Nature Index by complementary indicators for ecosystem services, in order to consider how the ecosystem services approach as a policy tool can be enhanced by taking into account an ecological framework for biodiversity measurement. & 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Assessment and valuation of ecosystem services is a topic of large political and scientific interest, expressed by the approaches of Millennium Ecosystem Assessments (MEA, 2005) and The Economics of Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity (TEEB, 2010). Although biodiversity loss is well documented (Global Biod- iversity Outlook, 2010), it has not reached the top of the political agenda (Braat and ten Brink et al., 2008). The difficulty of communicating nature values to policy makers – unless nature values carry a price-tag – has led many economists and ecologists to advocate monetary valuation of ecosystem services for prag- matic reasons, reflecting that “economists and policymakers speak the same language” (ten Brink, 2006). For example, the value of insect pollination of plants worldwide has been assessed to 150 billion euro (Gallai et al., 2009). Yet criticism is raised, as focus on monetary valuation of ecosystem services useful to humans may overshadow other values of biodiversity (Spash, 2008). The com- plexity of the relationship between ecosystem functions and the biodiversity that supports them challenges the conceptualization of ecosystem services and its usefulness for policy (Peterson et al., 2010; Mace et al., 2011). Continued exploration of different ways of building bridges between ecological and economic approaches is therefore important (Braat and de Groot, 2012; Farley, 2012). In this article, we consider how the ecosystem services approach as a policy tool can be enhanced by taking into account an ecological framework for biodiversity measurement. Specifi- cally, we discuss relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem services in the context of the Nature Index for Norway, recently developed as a framework for integrated biodiversity measure- ment (Nybø, 2010; Certain and Skarpaas et al., 2011; Nybø et al., 2012; Skarpaas et al., 2012). The article focuses on the use of biophysical indicators as both an alternative and a complementary approach to economic valuation, in order to express the impor- tance of biodiversity for the provision of ecosystem services, arguing that other policy responses than monetary valuation and commodification of ecosystem services are required. We discuss how the Nature Index framework can be used to highlight trade- offs between the capacity of ecosystems to deliver economically valued ecosystem services and other ecosystem services. We suggest extensions of the Nature Index approach to enhance its representation of ecosystem services, for example to relate the provision of ecosystem services to attributes of biodiversity at different levels, such as species, functional groups and community scales (Harrison et al., 2014). 2. Ecosystem services, ecosystem functions and biodiversity Ecosystem services are usually defined as direct and indirect contributions from ecosystems to human benefit(TEEB, 2010; de Groot et al., 2002). The term ecosystem services is widely interpreted as including goods and services, and in this extended Contents lists available at ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecoser Ecosystem Services http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2014.11.002 2212-0416/& 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. n Correspondence to: Statistics Norway, P.O. Box 8131 Dep, 0033 Oslo, Norway. Tel.: þ47 21 09 45 81, þ47 90 75 88 47. E-mail address: iulie.aslaksen@ssb.no (I. Aslaksen). Please cite this article as: Aslaksen, I., et al., Biodiversity and ecosystem services: The Nature Index for Norway. Ecosystem Services (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2014.11.002i Ecosystem Services ∎ (∎∎∎∎) ∎∎∎–∎∎∎