Version 5.1 of theCommon International Classification of Ecosystem Services(CICES) was published in 2018. On the basis of the experience gained by the user community its structure and scope has been reviewed, and a fully revised version, V5.2, has now been developed.
More than 1000 papers published since 2018 cite V5.1 in some way, and a number have made detailed comments on its structure, scope and how it can be applied. The aim of the revision for V5.2 has been to build on this success and the experience gained to ensure that CICES continues to be relevant and usable by the science and policy communities.
The EEA remains the custodian agency for CICES in the United Nations’ inventory of international classifications.
The final version of CICES 5.2 can be downloadedhere and the accompanying guidancehere.
In CICES ecosystem services are defined as thecontributions that ecosystems make to human well-being, and as distinct from the goods and benefits that people subsequently derive from them. These contributions are framed in terms of ‘what ecosystems do’ for people. Thus, in the revised version the definition of each service identifies both the purposes or uses that people have for the different kinds of ecosystem serviceandthe particular ecosystem attributes or behaviours that support them.
CICES aims to classify the contributions that ecosystems make to human well-being that arise from living processes. Although ecosystem outputs derived from living structures and processes remain the focus of CICES, feedback from the user community to broaden the classification to cover abiotic outputs has been addressed. The new version allows users to select only those ecosystem services that depend on living systems (i.e., biophysical ecosystem outputs) or to include the non-living (abiotic) parts of ecosystems that can also contribute to human well-being (geophysical ecosystem outputs).
The importance of providing detailed guidance to help people apply the classification was one of the key points to arise from the consultation on the earlier version of CICES. The formal and systematic definitions provided in V5.2 will help people identify more easily what the different services categories cover. The structure closely follows that of V5.1 and provides examples of the services themselves and types of associated benefit. In order to help users to work in more informal settings, suggestions for simpler non-technical names for services continue to be provided in the revised classification structure.
The hierarchal structure that was the basis of CICES V5.1 has been retained in the biophysical and geophysical parts of the revised classification. At the highest level in each part services are grouped accordingly into three Sections that relate to whether the contributions to human well-being support a) the provisioning of material and energy needs, b) regulation and maintenance of the environment for humans, or c) the non-material characteristics of ecosystems that affect physical and mental states of people.
Although the majority of the classes included in V5.1 carry over to V5.2, their ordering and coding has been modified slightly in the new version to enable users to more easily aggregate classes for reporting purposes, especially in relation to cultural ecosystem services. A full set of equivalences at Class level have been provided to enable users to make the transition to V5.2.
In addition to providing a way to classify ecosystem services, CICES was also intended as a reference classification that would allow translation between different ecosystem service classification systems, such as those used by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), and The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB). This feature has been retained in V5.2, and equivalence tables are provided. Tables for equivalences between CICES V5.1 and the UN SEEA Reference List, and the US EPA NESCS classification are also now available for V5.2.