The role of non-commercial intermediate services in the valuations of ecosystem services: Application to cork oak farms in Andalusia, Spain

Campos, Pablo; Oviedo, José L.; Álvarez, Alejandro; Mesa, Bruno; Caparrós, Alejandro

doi:10.1016/j.ecoser.2019.100996

Cited by 18 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…While there is a good understanding of the services that can be provided by agroforestry systems (Table 1), measurement or valuation of these services at the farm or paddock scale has been more limited. However, research in this area is developing rapidly, and there have been several recent studies that value a combination of private and public ecosystem services at the farm scale [45][46][47]. In Sections 2.2 and 2.3 we consider the current methodologies for both measurement and valuation to determine their application to agroforestry at the farm scale.…”

Section: Applying the Natural Capital Accounting Framework To Agroformentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In studies where regulating and cultural services such as soil protection, carbon sequestration, air quality, and amenity are included, these services tend to be valued with public beneficiaries in mind, rather than as 'inflows' to the agricultural enterprise [80]. Exceptions do exist, including work by Ovando et al [45], in which the private amenity of Mediterranean agroforestry farms is considered to ultimately be 'consumed' by the farmer through its effect on land prices [47,81]. Despite increasing demand for information in this space, there are still a limited number of studies assessing farm-scale economic benefits of agroforestry systems based on a broad range of use and non-use values, and fewer still that focus on the value of regulating services from a productivity perspective.…”

Section: Valuing Ecosystem Services At the Farm Scalementioning

confidence: 99%

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A Natural Capital Approach to Agroforestry Decision-Making at the Farm Scale

Marais

Baker

O’Grady

et al. 2019

Forests

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Background: Agroforestry systems can improve the provision of ecosystem services at the farm scale whilst improving agricultural productivity, thereby playing an important role in the sustainable intensification of agriculture. Natural capital accounting offers a framework for demonstrating the capacity of agroforestry systems to deliver sustained private benefits to farming enterprises, but traditionally is applied at larger scales than those at which farmers make decisions. Methods: Here we review the current state of knowledge on natural capital accounting and analyse how such an approach may be effectively applied to demonstrate the farm-scale value of agroforestry assets. We also discuss the merits of applying a natural capital approach to agroforestry decision-making and present an example of a conceptual model for valuation of agroforestry assets at the farm scale. Results: Our findings suggest that with further development of conceptual models to support existing tools and frameworks, a natural capital approach could be usefully applied to improve decision-making in agroforestry at the farm scale. Using this approach to demonstrate the private benefits of agroforestry systems could also encourage adoption of agroforestry, increasing public benefits such as biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation. However, to apply this approach, improvements must be made in our ability to predict the types and amounts of services that agroforestry assets of varying condition provide at the farm or paddock scale.

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Section: Applying the Natural Capital Accounting Framework To Agroformentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Valuing Ecosystem Services At the Farm Scalementioning

confidence: 99%

A Natural Capital Approach to Agroforestry Decision-Making at the Farm Scale

Marais

Baker

O’Grady

et al. 2019

Forests

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“…We focused on the following selected ecosystem indicators: (i) ordinary net valued added (NVAo) defined as the aggregation of the values for the compensation of employees, self-employed services, and net operating margin/surplus of the immobilized capital in the creation of the total product consumption in the period (year); and (ii) ecosystem service (ES), change in environmental asset (CEA), adjusted change in environmental net worth (CNWead), and environmental income (EI). In this study of the HOW, we assumed that the physical quantities and valuations at observed market prices for the commercial products and the simulated exchange values for the farmer and government final product consumptions without market prices were available to us [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. These data allowed us to focus on our conceptualization of the structures of the compared ecosystem accounting approaches and on the consistent measurement of the 12 ecosystem services (ES), changes in the environmental assets (CEA), and adjusted change in environmental net worth (CNWead) along with the environmental income (EI) to which the 15 economic activities considered in the Andalusian HOW contribute.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This research provides three main contributions. Firstly, we defined and measured ecosystem services from an economic perspective as the contribution of nature to the transaction value of the ordinary total product consumption directly or indirectly used by people in the accounting period [3,4,[8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. Total product consumption excludes the final product of own-account gross capital formation, both manufactured and natural growth, and the consumption of the environmental fixed asset (environmental degradation).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…From a more ecological perspective, other authors have added to the latter concept of ecosystem services the condition of being "direct and indirect contributions to sustainable human wellbeing" [18] (p. 8). These varied definitions present a polysemic labyrinth and go beyond our more specific measurement of economic ecosystem services in a manner consistent with the definition of social total income [2][3][4]8,10,19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Refined Systems of National Accounts and Experimental Ecosystem Accounting Versus the Simplified Agroforestry Accounting System: Testing in Andalusian Holm Oak Open Woodlands

Campos

Álvarez

Oviedo

et al. 2020

Forests

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The scientific debate over how to make visible the connections between the standard System of National Accounts (SNA) and its ongoing satellite Environmental Economic Ecosystem Accounting–Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA–EEA) is a challenge that is still pending. The literature on environmental accounting of agroforestry and silvopastoral landscapes rarely values the multiple ecosystem services of an area, an economic unit (e.g., farm), or a vegetation type (e.g., holm oak—Quercus ilex L.—open woodland). Generally, the literature presents the market value of the products consumed directly or a correction of the latter that reduces their exchange values in order to approximate them to their resource rents. In our previous publications, we have applied and compared our Agroforestry Accounting System (AAS) with the System of National Accounts (SNA), and we refined the latter to avoid the lag between income generation and its accounting in the period in which the product is extracted. These previous publications did not develop experimental applications of the SEEA–EEA with comparisons to the SNA and it being integrated into the AAS. The main novelty of this article is that, for the first time, we present detailed applications and comparisons of our developments of the refined SEEA–EEA and refined SNA with a simplified version of the AAS. The accounting frameworks applied take the production and capital accounts in the process of being updated by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) at the scale of the holm oak open woodlands of Andalusia into account. In this study, we compare three environmental accounting approaches for ecosystem services and environmental income measurements at basic and social prices: our slightly refined standard System of National Accounts (rSNA); our refined, updated and ongoing satellite System of Environmental Economic Accounting–Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (rSEEA–EEA); and our simplified Agroforestry Accounting System (sAAS). We tested them for 15 economic activities in 1408 thousand hectares of the predominantly mixed holm oak open woodland (HOW) land use tiles in the region of Andalusia, Spain. We considered the government institutional sector to be the collective owner of public economic activities, which we incorporated in the rSNA and the sAAS approaches. We discuss consistencies in environmental incomes identified from the results of the three ecosystem accounting frameworks applied to the HOW. The discrepancies in the measurement of ecosystem services of the government institutional sector between the rSEEA–EEA and the sAAS were due to the omission in the former of the government manufactured costs incurred in the supply of freely consumed public final products. The most notable finding of our comparison is that the ecosystem services and the environmental income results for individual market products offered the same values, whichever the ecosystem accounting framework applied. This was not the case with the ecosystem services of public products without market prices, due to the fact that the rSNA estimates these products at production cost and the rSEEA–EEA did not consider the government manufactured production costs and ordinary manufactured net operating margin of government final public product consumption. We also found that, according to modeling of the scheduled management of future biological resources of the HOW, the environmental income shows biological sustainability of the individual nature-based total product consumption.

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