2005: Human health, well-being, and global ecological scenarios

This article categorizes four kinds of adverse effects to human health caused by ecosystem change: di-rect, mediated, modulated, and systems failure. The effects are categorized on their scale, complexity, and lag-time. Some but not all of these can be classified as resulting from reduced ecosystem ser-vices. The articles also explores the impacts that different socioeconomic–ecologic scenarios are likely to have on human health and how changes to human health may, in turn, influence the unfolding of four different plausible future scenar-ios. We provide examples to show that our cate-gorization is a useful taxonomy for understanding the complex relationships between ecosystems and human well-being and for predicting how future ecosystem changes may affect human health