Biodiversity and ecosystem services: The Nature Index for Norway

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.