Abstract
There is growing consensus regarding the implementation of a new statistical framework for environmental-economic accounting to improve ecosystem related policies. As the standard System of National Accounts (SNA) fails to measure the economic contribution of ecosystems to the total income of individuals, governments recognize the need to expand the standard SNA through the ongoing System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA). Based on the authors’ own data, this study focuses on linking 15 economic activities and 12 ecosystem services for a holm oak (Quercus ilex L.) open woodlands (HOW) ecosystem type in Andalusia, Spain. We emphasize that overcoming the challenges of multiple use is preferable to measuring single ecosystem products for improving habitat conservation policies. The objectives of this paper are to measure and compare the environmental assets, ecosystem services, and incomes at basic and social prices by applying a refined version of the standard System of National Accounts (rSNA) and the authors’ Agroforestry Accounting System (AAS), respectively, to HOW. Considering intermediate products and consumptions of HOW farmer and government activities, we find that the rSNA ecosystem services and environmental incomes at basic prices are 123.3 €/ha and −28.0 €/ha, respectively, while those of the AAS at social prices are 442.2 €/ha and 250.8 €/ha. Given advances in non-market valuation techniques, we show that an expanded definition of economic activities can be applied to measure the contribution to total income of managed natural areas taking into account the multiple uses of the ecosystem type. However, HOW sustainability continues to be a challenging issue that requires ecological threshold indicators to be identified, not only because of the economic implications but also because they provide vital information on which to base policy implementation.
Highlights
In the SNA the net value added (NVASNA ) of the economic activities does not include natural growth (NG) in the own-account gross capital formation (GCF) as a final product, and omits the environmental work in progress used (WPeu) from the intermediate consumption (IC). These omissions lead to a NVASNA bias associated with the timing of their measurement, which is avoided in this study by refining the standard System of National Accounts, which includes their measurement in the NVArSNA
The System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA)-EEA does not explicitly mention the environmental income of the ecosystems, but gives the measurements separately for the ecosystem services (ES) and the change in environmental asset (CEA) of the individual product. These two variables added together give the value of the environmental income, and depending on the specific accounting conventions of the environmental production and balance accounts, the CEA is adjusted in the case of certain individual products in order to give the adjusted change in environmental net worth (CNWead) according to the environmental work in progress used (WPeu), as we have shown in Section 2 and Supplementary Text S3
The second conclusion is that the omission of the valuations of corporation activities producing non-commercial intermediate services (ISSnc) used by activities which are valued as own non-commercial intermediate consumption (SSncoo) leads to variations in the aggregate values added of the farmer and government activities
Summary
Since 2010, national and international government institutions responsible for producing economic statistics on environmental governance and economic development have been pointing to the need to Forests 2020, 11, 185; doi:10.3390/f11020185 www.mdpi.com/journal/forestsForests 2020, 11, 185 incorporate the contribution of nature to the income and capital of nations, to date, these concerns have brought about advances as regards environmental refinement in the application of the statistical office standard System of National Accounts (SNA) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. One of the main challenges complicating the extension of the System of National Accounts (SNA) to explicitly incorporate the environment as an economic production factor is the consistency of the inclusion of values for products with and without market prices, when extending the SNA to estimate the real contributions of nature to the national product and social total income, as well as to evaluate the depletion and degradation of nature through government policy implementation. Another of the challenges regards the limits of environmental valuations in situations of ‘critical’ (threshold) amounts of renewable biophysical environmental assets. The coordinated response of the governmental statistical offices to the demand for extending the indicator of SNA net value added (NVASNA ), involves the development of the satellite System of Environmental Economic Accounting—Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA-EEA) [12,13]
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