Assessing the economic value of Posidonia oceanica (L.) at Tremiti Islands (Mediterranean Sea): An ecosystem condition-based approach.

In the context of limiting global warming, the seagrass Posidonia oceanica (L.) gained the centrality of several international climate change mitigation projects being the most effective carbon storage sink among Mediterranean seagrasses. To assess and monitor the change of environmental conditions and economic values of natural resources, the present study moves from the insights of the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting - Ecosystem Accounting to assess the economic value of the carbon sequestration and storage capacity of the Mediterranean-endemic seagrass P. oceanica at the Tremiti Islands Marine Protected Area. The economic value is compared across: i. the reference study by Pergent-Martini et al.; ii. the ecological condition-based approach; and iii. the unit value transfer. Based on the obtained outcomes, an ecosystem-based approach would prevent biases in the accounting of the ecosystem-service provision capacity of P. oceanica and help the policy maker to implement adequate public investment policies to mitigate its overall degradation.

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.