Abstract
The standard System of National Accounts (SNA) omits the costs of the environmental inputs from nature and the environmental fixed asset degradation from the national/sub-national natural working landscapes. The United Nations Statistic Division (UNSD) is currently drafting the standardization of the Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (EEA), as part of the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA). The EEA- aims to mitigate some of the limitations of the SNA by extending the concept of economic activity and explicitly incorporating ecosystem services and environmental assets provided by nature in the estimates of net value added, adjusted according to the costs of the environmental inputs consumed and the environmental fixed asset degradations of ecosystem. However, the NVAad proposed in the ongoing draft of the EEA is inconsistent in that it omits the manufactured costs of the public economic activities of the new government institutional sub-sector of the ecosystem trustee. In addition, the ongoing methodological guidelines of the EEA do not propose to estimate the environmental income. This implies that there is not a single indicator that integrates the ecosystem services obtained and the evolution of the environmental assets in the natural working landscapes in which the private and public activities are valued. The objective of this research is to discuss conceptually and compare the measurements of ecosystem services and environmental incomes in the extended Agroforestry Accounting System (AAS), and in refined versions of the official SNA and the ongoing EEA methodologies, through a case study of privately-owned holm oak dehesas working landscapes in Andalusia-Spain. This comparison shows that the refined SNA and the refined EEA in their current state of development do not allow the complete visualization of the environmental income contribution to the total income of the natural working landscapes. We also discuss the advances provided by the AAS extended accounting methodology that would be relevant for the EEA next improvements.
Highlights
The scientific debate on economic ecosystem accounting is a mul tidisciplinary and interdisciplinary challenge of enormous complexity
The refined version of the official EEA (rEEA) we have developed is a notable advance on the refined standard System of National Accounts (rSNA), it still has certain inconsistencies with respect to ordinary operating income theory in the valuations of the net operating margins and the net value added of the ecosystem institu tional sector
We propose the standardization of the rEEA by (i) extending the System of National Accounts (SNA) through new economic activities only depending on environmental production factors, (ii) incorporating the inter mediate products derived from the opportunity costs, and (iii) by sub stituting the valuation of final products without market prices at cost price in the SNA by a valuation founded on simulated prices based on the consumers’ willingness to pay
Summary
The scientific debate on economic ecosystem accounting is a mul tidisciplinary and interdisciplinary challenge of enormous complexity. There are scarce experimental academic and national statistical office applications at national/subnational ecosystem type scales that extend the standard SNA (Hein et al, 2020a, 2020b; Keith et al, 2017; Obst, 2019; Remme et al, 2015; Sumarga et al, 2015). We advocate the measurement of total environmental income of the ecosystem types with reference to the specific natural landscape and territorial economic unit of individual farms in ac cordance with the total income of society (Eisner, 1989; Hicks, 1946; Krutilla, 1967; McElroy, 1976; Stone, 1984)
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