How natural capital accounting frameworks fail ecosystem services

Ecosystem services are the benefits humans get from nature, such as fresh food, healthy soils and clean water, as well as climate regulation, pollination and disease control. 

Without these essential services, humanity could not survive. For example, without clean water, nutrient-rich soil, or pollinators, food production would collapse. Similarly, without climate and air regulation, life-sustaining conditions on our planet would collapse. 

Despite these dire consequences, our current economic system values dead nature yet gives living nature a price of zero. As a result, living nature becomes invisible to many, leading to an attitude that we can kill, cut, extract, pollute and abuse it with impunity. To avoid this outcome, it is argued that nature should be valued, enabling the value of these natural assets and services to be understood by those who make decisions that impact nature.  

This is where natural capital accounting frameworks enter the equation.  These frameworks have been developed to provide a method for valuing and accounting for living nature and the ecosystem services it provides to support human existence, which otherwise have no direct monetary value. It does this by translating the ecological value of these services into monetary terms. This is done to make the true value of these services more easily understood by decision makers. By incorporating them into economic decision-making, it was expected this would make it easier to justify investments in healthy ecosystems and the restoration of degraded ones.  

However, achieving this requires the natural capital accounting frameworks to get it right. Unfortunately, the frameworks that are in use today fail in that regard because they tend to focus on economically important natural resources, such as trees that produce timber, namely those parts of nature that can be easily monetized. This frequently leads to strong bias towards natural resources such as timber, minerals or fish, while neglecting resources that are more difficult to monetize, such as the diversity of animal, fungal and plant species (biodiversity) as well as cultural heritage and well-being.  

What is generally not well understood through these frameworks is that even commercially important natural resources, such as timber, minerals and fish, are merely cogs in highly complex systems, where everything is interconnected. Simply said, all the ecosystem components are required to work together in order for economically valuable natural resources and processes to survive and persist respectively. 

Biased accounting is dangerous as it results in the true value of nature being seriously underestimated, leading to decisions that prioritize economic development over environmental protection. This results in inadequate investment in healthy ecosystems to promote sustainable land and ocean management, and the restoration of degraded and/or polluted ecosystems.  This result flies in the face of the ultimate goal of this exercise, which is to provide decision makers with advice on the true values of ecosystems in order to mitigate climate change and to protect biodiversity, and thereby maintain a liveable planet for future generations.  

If natural capital accounting frameworks are to achieve their stated objective, their underlying methodologies need to be revisited, and a less complicated but robust model needs to be developed that can be applied in data-poor conditions as well. This is what we explore in depth in our article published in the European Journal of Environmental Sciences. 

This article is also published on the European Journal of Environmental Sciences. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.