Abstract
Accounting for ecosystems is increasingly central to natural capital accounting. What is missing from this, however, is an answer to questions about how natural capital is distributed. That is, who consumes ecosystem services and who owns or manages the underlying asset(s) that give rise to ecosystem services. In this paper, we examine the significance of the ownership of land on which ecosystem assets (or ecosystem types) is located in the context of natural capital accounting. We illustrate this in an empirical application to two ecosystem services and a range of ecosystem types and land ownership in Scotland, a context in which land reform debates are longstanding. Our results indicate the relative importance of private land in ecosystem service supply, rather than land held by the public sector. We find relative concentration of ownership for land providing comparatively high amounts of carbon sequestration. For air pollution removal, however, the role of smaller to medium sized, mostly privately owned, land holdings closer to urban settlements becomes more prominent. The contributions in this paper, we argue, represent important first steps in anticipating distributional impacts of natural capital (and related) policy in natural capital accounts as well as connecting these frameworks to broader concerns about wealth disparities across and within countries.
Highlights
Natural capital accounting (NCA) describes a body of statistical work that seeks to construct better metrics of nature for policy
In the current paper we focus on a different spatial dimension that has so far been neglected in NCA: how natural capital is distributed amongst economic actors, i.e. people and organizations
While the SEEA-EA anticipates that adding distributional layers on land management and ownership characteristics might be critical for assessing policy effectiveness (UN 2021, p. 59), we argue that it is likely to be important for what it reveals about how natural wealth is distributed and how distributional effects of environmental policies might be anticipated using NCA
Summary
Natural capital accounting (NCA) describes a body of statistical work that seeks to construct better metrics of nature for policy. A core of this work has focused on ecosystems.1 Barbier (2011) defines natural capital in this context as the physical area of a recognizable ecological landscape For practical purposes this is often interpreted as referring to broad habitats, more commonly called ecosystem types. A growing number of countries have set statistical processes for ecosystem accounting in motion (see, for a review and discussion, Hein et al 2020a) It is such efforts that we describe as NCA in this paper. We account for the use and supply distribution of two ecosystem services (climate change regulation through carbon sequestration and air pollution removal) across private and publicly owned land on which natural capital is located.
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