The benefits people obtain from ecosystems. According to the original formulation of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA, 2005), ecosystem services are divided into supporting, regulating, provisioning, and cultural. While supporting services are elementary from an ecological perspective, CICES, a more recent accounting framework recognises only the latter three categories to avoid double counting.
Source: IPBES (2019), Global Assessment Report, Glossary; CICES, Version 5.1, 2018.
