Ecosystems provide humans with ecosystem services - benefits fundamental to human well-being. The Swedish government has set a milestone target to be reached by 2018, that the importance of biodiversity and values of ecosystem services should be commonly known and adopted in political and economic decisions. The use of ecosystem service assessments can be beneficial in local and regional planning and increase understanding of ecosystem services among decision-makers. Being of such importance it is of interest if, and how ecosystem services are integrated in planning and decision-making in the Norrbotten County. This study aims togive an overview of how far municipalities in Sweden has reached with the integration of ecosystem services. This was done by investigating explicit implementation, contribution to the milestone target and, if/how ecosystem services are used in local governance and especially regarding climate adaptation.
The results show that only four of the 14 municipalities have integrated ecosystem services, further that there is an absence of explicit use of ecosystem services in climate adaptation. Thisindicates that the level of knowledge about the ES concept is low and that implementation has not been successful in the county. Positively though, the county has a forerunner in the Arjeplog municipality, which can serve as role model for the rest of the county to achieve an implementation of ES in local governance.