Beyond the economic boundaries to account for ecosystem services

Alessandra La Notte, Sara Vallecillo, Alexandra Marques and Joachim Maes

Ecosystem Services, 2019, vol. 35, issue C, 116-129

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Ecosystem services accounting; Supply and use tables; Production boundary; Sustainability assessment; Ecosystem services flow types (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212041617307246
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoser:v:35:y:2019:i:c:p:116-129

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecoser.2018.12.007

Access Statistics for this article

Ecosystem Services is currently edited by Leon C Braat

More articles in Ecosystem Services from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().