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New releases on Ecosystem Services valuation and accounting

Reports cover

The presented publications are the latest reports on Ecosystem Services valuation and accounting:

  1. Ecosystem Services Accounting – Part III - Pilot accounts for habitat and species maintenance, on-site soil retention and water purification

    The purpose of ecosystem services accounting is to quantify the main transactions from ecosystems to society and economy and to report these transactions into accounting tables that are compatible with the structures and practices used in traditional economic accounting. The European Commission launched in 2015 the INCA (Integrated system for Natural Capital Accounting) project to produce concrete applications for the EU, compliant with the international standard of the System of Environmental Economic Accounting – Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EEA). In this report we assess, value and account for three new ecosystem services: Habitat and Species Maintenance, on site Soil Retention and Water Purification. We also review and improve already existing ecosystem services accounts, such as Crop and Timber provision, Carbon Sequestration and Crop Pollination. Based on the nine ecosystem services accounts compiled for the EU, we finally start processing INCA readily available indicators, that can support policy analysis and can contribute to international reference frameworks such as the post 2020 Biodiversity framework and the Sustainable Development Goals.
     
  2. How much do Europeans value biodiversity?

    Biodiversity is an intangible asset essential for ecosystem function and human wellbeing. The European Union is at the forefront of biodiversity management and policy implementation and has set ambitious strategies to better protect biodiversity and lead achievement of global biodiversity goals. However, biodiversity management entails balancing a range of economic and social trade-offs. A deeper understanding of society’s perception towards biodiversity, the values attached to it, and the heterogeneity around preferences for biodiversity protection and habitat maintenance is key to inform future European strategies. This report provides European-level spatially explicit estimates of biodiversity non-use value applicable in the decision-making processes and appreciates the hidden contribution of habitat and species maintenance to human wellbeing. A stated preference survey with the choice experiment was conducted in four European countries that were selected to represent a range of diverse environmental and social contexts. A European map of biodiversity values is produced via value transfer techniques. Overall, our results suggest that strengthening habitat and species maintenance policy is considered a necessity by the public. In fact, considering the aggregated amount Europeans are prepared to pay annually (30 billion Euros) for biodiversity, we can anticipate that the Post-2020 Biodiversity policy committed to an annual budget of 20 billion Euros would likely find public support.