With the impacts of climate change and human activities, lake ecosystem nowadays is suffering from multiple threats and its services function becomes degenerated. It is urgent to evaluate objectively the value of the lake ecosystem services and to predict their future state. Understanding the historical evolution process of ecosystem services and its mechanism is crucial for predicting the future changes of ecosystem service. However, most of the existing instrumental record on ecosystem service is too short (< 50 a). With continuous sedimentation, lake sediments can provide detail information on the long-term changes of the lake ecosystem services. With a review on previous studies, this paper introduced a few palaeolimnology indexes that can be linked to various forms of lake ecosystem service. We also presented a case study of Lake Chaohu to demonstrate how the implementation of these proxies could indicate the lake ecosystem services. This study showed that the growth in economy and production supply capacity is always at the cost of the loss of regulating services of lakes. Although such kind of research is still in its infancy, there's no doubt that it will be of great benefit to palaeolimnology development and can provide a scientific basis for decision making in the protection and sustainable utilization of lake ecosystem in the future.