Environmental incomes: Refined standard and extended accounts applied to cork oak open woodlands in Andalusia, Spain

Abstract

Abstract In this research, our objectives are twofold: firstly to conceptualize and compare the ecosystem services and environmental incomes of individual activities at producer, basic and social prices using the extended accounts (Agroforestry Accounting System) and the refined standard accounts (a slightly refined standard System of National Accounts), and secondly, to apply both methodologies at a scale of 4,095 land-cover tiles predominately occupied by cork oak open woodlands (COW), which cover 248,015 ha in Andalusia, Spain. This analysis considers spatial-explicit characteristics of COW across Andalusia. The 15 COW economic activities valued in 2010 include: timber, cork, firewood, nuts, grazing, conservation forestry, residential services, private amenity, fire services, water supply, mushroom, carbon, free access recreation, landscape conservation services and threatened wild biodiversity preservation services. In this research, the ecosystem service is defined as an economic indicator that provides information on the contribution of nature to product consumption by humans in the period, but with an uncertain meaning of ecological sustainability. We show that environmental income is the maximum economic value in the period of sustainable ecosystem service with both ecological and economic significance only if the future sustainable biophysical silvicultural management scenarios are accounted for. To measure environmental incomes, we model the future sustainable silviculture while considering all the management practices required to maintain cork oak woodlands in perpetuity. We use farm-level data to estimate voluntary opportunity costs incurred by land and livestock owners associated with hunting and livestock activities of the farmer as well as their subsequent scaling up to COW land-cover tiles in order to estimate environmental incomes at social prices for each individual activity. In this study, we measure the ecosystem services and incomes of the COW private amenity and public landscape activities at social prices, that is, their basic prices less own compensated and auto-consumed non-commercial intermediate consumption of services used by the private amenity and public landscape activities. The ecosystem services and environmental incomes of cork oak open woodlands measured by the extended accounts at basic prices in 2010 were 1.1 and 1.2 times higher, respectively, than those estimated at social prices. The ecosystem services and environmental incomes measured at basic prices by the refined standard accounts were 0.3 and 0.2 times, respectively, those estimated by the extended accounts at social prices.