Conserving natural atmospheric, terrestrial, freshwater and marine biodiversity—and restoring degraded ecological systems—is essential for the overall goals of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This is because ecosystems play a key role in the global carbon cycle and in adapting to climate change, while providing a wide range of ecosystem services that are essential for human well-being and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.

Ecosystem-based management (EBM) is an integrated, science-based approach to the management of natural resources that aims to sustain the health, resilience and diversity of ecosystems while allowing for sustainable use by humans of the goods and services they provide. All ecological systems face a multiplicity of threats from human activities. Many of these threats are on the rise, especially—for example—as coastal populations continue to grow around the world. In this instance, growing population places pressure on the oceans, affecting coastal water quality and human health; the availability of healthy, abundant seafood to feed people; the abundance and diversity of marine life; and even climate.

Around the world, governance and management of ecological systems has been fragmented, with decisions made sector by sector or issue by issue, despite the clear feedbacks among these arenas. In contrast to traditional approaches to management, ecosystem-based management is an integrated, place-based approach to the management of human activities that has been proposed (and in some cases legislated and implemented) as a solution to the complex challenges present.

Ecosystem-based management has been defined in a wide variety of ways, in part because the concept is early in its development, it is evolving as it is adopted and applied for different purposes, and the site-specific nature of ecosystems and associated human activities prevents a single approach and definition from working universally.

Broadly speaking, ecosystem-based management is an integrated approach to management that considers the entire ecosystem, linkages across systems and disciplines, and the cumulative impacts of different human sectors. Its aim is to sustain ecosystems in a healthy, productive and resilient condition so that they can provide the functions, goods and services that enrich and sustain human well-being. As such, ecosystem-based management necessarily incorporates biological, physical and human components, including social and economic systems.

Ecosystem-based management’s goals include learning how these bio-, physicochemical- and socio-economic spheres interact, and finding institutional and scientific ways of managing multiple human activities within entire ecosystems (rather than arbitrary management units), based on this understanding of the linkages among activities and social and ecological system components.

By contrast, ecosystem management, (as opposed to ecosystem-based management), emphasizes ecological interactions within an ecosystem, rather than human activities, and implies that it is possible to understand, control and manage entire ecosystems.

This approach emphasizes developing management systems that are “safe to fail, rather than fail-safe,” and that are precautionary and adaptive given significant uncertainty about and evolving understanding of both present and future ecological system dynamics.