Ecosystem services accounts: Valuing the actual flow of nature-based recreation from ecosystems to people.

Natural capital accounting aims to measure changes in the stock of natural assets (i.e., soil, air, water and all living things) and to integrate the value of ecosystem services into accounting systems that will contribute to better ecosystems management. This study develops ecosystem services accounts at the European Union level, using nature-based recreation as a case study and following the current international accounting framework: System of Environmental-Economic Accounting - Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EEA). We adapt and integrate different biophysical and socio-economic models, illustrating the workflow necessary for ecosystem services accounts: from a biophysical assessment of nature-based recreation to an economic valuation and compilation of the accounting tables. The biophysical assessment of nature-based recreation is based on spatially explicit models for assessing different components of ecosystem services: potential, demand and actual flow. Deriving maps of ecosystem service potential and demand is a key step in quantifying the actual flow of the service used, which is determined by the spatial relationship (i.e., proximity in the case of nature-based recreation) between service potential and demand. The nature-based recreation accounts for 2012 show an actual flow of 40 million potential visits to 'high-quality areas for daily recreation', with a total value of EUR 50 billion. This constitutes an important contribution of ecosystems to people's lives that has increased by 26% since 2000. Practical examples of ecosystem services accounts, as shown in this study, are required to derive recommendations and further develop the conceptual and methodological framework proposed by the SEEA EEA. This paper highlights the importance of using spatially explicit models for ecosystem services accounts. Mapping the different components of ecosystem services allows proper identification of the drivers of changes in the actual service flow derived from ecosystems, socio-economic systems and/or their spatial relationship. This will contribute to achieving one of the main goals of ecosystem accounts, namely measuring changes in natural capital, but it will also support decision-making that targets the enhancement of ecosystems, their services and the benefits they provide.

Capacity as "virtual stock" in ecosystem services accounting.

Interest in ecosystem services accounting is growing exponentially. There are many un-solved issues that need to be addressed, the notion of capacity is among them. International guidelines suggest that capacity should constitute the link between the ecosystem assets accounts and the ecosystem services accounts. In order to address this issue, the authors use Supply and Use table for ecosystem services to show the relationship between (i) ecosystem assets and (ii) capacity, intended as "virtual stock" of individual ecosystem services. It is in fact important to distinguish ecosystem assets from capacity as "virtual stock": a comparison between asset accounts for natural resources and capacity is presented to clarify this difference. This novel approach is described together with its implications in order to feed further developments and discussion.

Accounting for forest condition in Europe based on an international statistical standard.

Covering 35% of Europe's land area, forest ecosystems play a crucial role in safeguarding biodiversity and mitigating climate change. Yet, forest degradation continues to undermine key ecosystem services that forests deliver to society. Here we provide a spatially explicit assessment of the condition of forest ecosystems in Europe following a United Nations global statistical standard on ecosystem accounting, adopted in March 2021. We measure forest condition on a scale from 0 to 1, where 0 represents a degraded ecosystem and 1 represents a reference condition based on primary or protected forests. We show that the condition across 44 forest types averaged 0.566 in 2000 and increased to 0.585 in 2018. Forest productivity and connectivity are comparable to levels observed in undisturbed or least disturbed forests. One third of the forest area was subject to declining condition, signalled by a reduction in soil organic carbon, tree cover density and species richness of threatened birds. Our findings suggest that forest ecosystems will need further restoration, improvements in management and an extended period of recovery to approach natural conditions.

Accounting for changes in flood control delivered by ecosystems at the EU level.

Ecosystem service accounts require quantifying the contribution of ecosystems to the society. However, estimation of the ecosystem service used (actual flow) remains still very challenging for regulating services. We developed an experimental ecosystem service account for flood control delivered by ecosystems including: 1) Biophysical modelling of ecosystem service potential, demand and actual flow. 2) Translation of the actual flow in monetary terms. 3) Compilation of accounting tables. Ultimately, we analysed changes in flood control between 2006 and 2012. The value of flood control delivered by ecosystems in 2012 is estimated at about 16 billion euro. This value increased by 1.14% between 2006 and 2012. This increase is mainly due to the sprawl of artificial areas into floodplains that benefit from flood control delivered by ecosystems. However, the role of natural capital to control floods is slightly decreasing. This is confirmed by the increase of artificial areas not protected by ecosystems (+1.9%, unmet demand). The role of natural capital to control floods could be enhanced by restoring ecosystems upstream from this unmet demand and increase the ecosystems contribution to human well-being. The methodology makes a significant contribution to the assessment of ecosystem services flow and the accounting framework.

A sustainability scoreboard for crop provision in Europe.

The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting for Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (SEEA AFF) offers the possibility to assess and report detailed accounts for primary industries while establishing important linkages with relevant ecosystem services, in line with the SEEA Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EEA). In this paper, crop products and crop provision as ecosystem service are coherently merged to build a sustainability scoreboard for selected crops in European countries. The sustainability scoreboard uses the SEEA AFF accounts for crop products with data inputs from FAOSTAT and the Integrated system of Natural Capital Accounts (INCA) of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) for ecosystem services. The combined FAO-JRC accounting table described in this paper provides a common ground and measurement tool towards a sustainability scoreboard, useful to analyse how relevant economic, social and environmental components behave by country. This newly derived sustainability scoreboard presents significant differences with respect to analyses based on standard agricultural statistics. Lack of sufficiently accurate data remains the major limitation to current fuller implementation of the sustainability scoreboard. However reasonable assumption can be made that ongoing international data collection processes (including FAO questionnaires) integrated with Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis will supply in the near future additional relevant and applicable information.

Dangers of predicting bird species distributions in response to land-cover changes.

Land-cover changes from the last decades are leading to important declines in habitat quality, giving rise to changes in bird species distribution all over the world. However, land-cover changes result from a variety of different processes, and it is not clear how effective species distribution models are in capturing species responses to these changes. In this study, we evaluated our ability to predict the effects of land-cover changes on shifts in species distributions at large spatial and temporal scales using Mediterranean landscapes and early-successional, open-habitat birds as study models. Based on presence-absence data from the second Catalan Breeding Bird Atlas (1999-2002), we applied six different species distribution modeling techniques for 10 bird species using climate, topographic, and land-cover data as predictor variables. Then we back-projected the models on land-cover conditions from 1980 to evaluate the projections with field observation data from the first Catalan Breeding Bird Atlas (1975-1983). Finally, we assessed if, in addition to changes in habitat suitability resulting from land-cover shifts, descriptors of fire impact contributed to further explain species distribution dynamics: colonization and local extinction. We developed accurate model projections of current and past global patterns of species distribution, but our ability to predict species distribution dynamics was reduced. Colonization dynamics were generally more strongly related to fire descriptors than to changes in overall habitat suitability derived from land-cover changes. Our results warn of the dangers of projecting species distribution models onto future conditions if processes behind species distribution dynamics are not explicitly included. Consideration of ecologically meaningful processes for species (i.e., fire disturbance) when modeling species' distribution might contribute to a better explanation of species' colonization dynamics.

How ecosystem services are changing: an accounting application at the EU level.

Ecosystem services accounts are a useful tool that provides relevant information on the role of ecosystems in delivering services, and the society benefiting from them. This paper presents the accounting workflow for ecosystem services at the European Union level adopted by the Knowledge Innovation Project on an Integrated system for Natural Capital and ecosystem services Accounting (KIP INCA) - a European Commission initiative. The workflow includes: 1) biophysical assessment of ecosystem services; 2) monetary valuation; and 3) compilation of accounting tables. Supply and use tables are presented for six ecosystem services assessed so far. The supply table shows woodland and forest, followed by wetlands, as the ecosystem types with the highest monetary value per unit area. Analyses of changes between 2000 and 2012 show an overall increase of the monetary value of ecosystem services, mainly due to an increase in demand for them. We also discuss advantages and disadvantages of adopting a fast-track approach, based on official statistics, in comparison to an accounting strategy based on spatial models. We propose a novel workflow for ecosystem services accounts, focused on assessment of the actual flow of ecosystem services, making a significant contribution to further development of the technical recommendations for ecosystem services accounts.

Beyond the economic boundaries to account for ecosystem services.

Ecosystem services (ES) accounts are essential to quantify and monitor the contribution of ecosystems to human well-being. The System of Environmental and Economic Accounting - Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EEA) is the first attempt to provide a set of standards to compile ecosystem accounts. We argue for the inclusion of an ecological perspective in the SEEA EEA that considers ecosystems to be more than input providers to the economy. Ecosystems can act as accounting units capable of producing, consuming and recording changes in regeneration and absorption rates. To account for that we propose (i) to identify ES typologies according to the way in which energy, biomass and information is released to generate services; (ii) to use these typologies to define the concepts of ES potential, ES potential flows, ES demand and ES actual flows; and (iii) to build the ES capacity accounts in monetary terms based on these concepts. These arguments are illustrated with case studies for water purification and crop pollination accounts in European countries. Extending the production boundary would allow the measurement of the sustainable use of ES and the establishment of causality between the use of ES and the value accrued by the economic actors and households.