Global and Mexican analytical review of the state of the art on Ecosystem and Environmental services: A geographical approach

Resumen

The term Ecosystem Services (ES) was introduced in the Rio Declaration in 1992, within a strong international movement for sustainable natural resource management. Back then, the innovative principle concerned the environmental functions that maintain life support systems. To illustrate this further, pollination, oxygen production, temperature regulation, water storage, filtering and distribution, among others, were listed and previously taken for granted until human action contested them. The first compensation schemes for Environmental Services were proposed in 1997 as one of the tools of the new environmental policy directed towards the principles of sustainable development. Since then, the topic of ES has received remarkable global response, which is reflected by the implementation of payment programs and by the development of research in many countries worldwide. This paper analyses the state of the art of the research carried out so far on ES and Environmental Services from the global and the Mexican perspectives. It is based upon the review of 1,781 scientific papers published in international peer reviewed journals between 1992 and 2012. Furthermore, the present study provides a sound geographical overview of the main ES topics studied and of the relative emission of papers per region, country or state. Results are finally presented and discussed in the light of their deficits and of the challenges ahead.