Abstract
This research applies and compares the Agroforestry Accounting System (AAS) and the lightly revised System of National Accounts (SNA) in five cork oak farms in Andalusia, Spain, in 2010. We value eighteen economic activities, eleven of which are managed by individual farmers and seven of which are overseen by government. Our objectives are to measure and compare ecosystem services (ES), gross value added (GVA) and environmental income (EI). The comparison takes into account the valuation of products at producer, basic and social prices. Our most noteworthy novelty is that the AAS proposal incorporates the environmental income as a variable which serves as a reference value for the condition of economic sustainability of ecosystem service consumption. Our results show that ES and GVA estimates vary depending on the omission/measurement of auto-consumed/donated non-commercial intermediate services and nature based activity with zero ES value represents nature’s free physical service contribution to the farms net value added. Farms AAS ecosystem services at social prices contribute to 64% of final product consumption, and ES at basic prices represent 1.2 times the ES at social prices. Farm revised SNA ecosystem services at basic prices are 0.5 times the AAS ecosystem services at social prices.
Highlights
Statistical institutions recognize the importance of valuing ecosystem services and their environmental assets as well as incorporating them in, or at least linking them, to the System of National Accounts (SNA) by 2020 (European Commission, 2011; United Nations, 2012)
We developed the modeling of natural growth and the silviculture applied according to own forest inventories at the farms complemented by data from the third Spanish National Inventory
Growth dynamics and game species captures were based on data from previous research by the authors as well as information on hunting captures in farms provided by the Andalusian government
Summary
Statistical institutions recognize the importance of valuing ecosystem services and their environmental assets as well as incorporating them in, or at least linking them, to the System of National Accounts (SNA) by 2020 (European Commission, 2011; United Nations, 2012). Preliminary guidelines discussion can be found in the System of Environmental–Economic Accounting 2012–Experimental Ecosystem Accounting-SEEA-EEA (United Nations et al, 2014b) and more recently, the technical recommendations developed by the United Nations (2017). These publications depict the criteria for valuing the contributions of ecosystem services to direct and indirect single economic product consumption, with the aim of connecting them to the standard accounts. The SEEA-EEA discussion is still open to extending the scope of environmental-economic flows and stocks beyond the production function boundary of the standard accounts
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