UNCOVERING THE HIDDEN ECOSYSTEM SERVICES EMBEDDED IN ENVIRONMENTAL INCOMES: TESTING EXPERIMENTAL EXTENDED ACCOUNTS IN DEHESAS OF HOLM OAK WOODLANDS, ANDALUSIA-SPAIN

Highlights
Extended accounts dehesas´ environmental asset is 84% of total opening capital.
Farmer extended accounts dehesas´ share the 61% of total environmental asset.
Extended accounts dehesas´ ecosystem services are 45% of final product consumed.
Standard accounts’ ecosystem services are 34% of extended accounts’.

Abstract

The ultimate goal of scholars and governmental institutions is to demonstrate nature in standard statistics, leading government agendas to the development of environmental-economic accounts which uncover hidden actual ecosystem services embedded in goods and services consumed by humans. In regards to physical and economic sustainable natural resource use, which lies beyond actual ecosystem services estimation, the potential sustainable ecosystem services indicator is a useful tool for nature conservation´s design and implementation. This indicator is defined as the environmental-economic
reference for sustainable natural resource use. This research proposes that the potential sustainable ecosystem service indicator is the environmental income as measured by the extended accounts in this research. Our objective here is to compare the extended and the refined standard accounting frameworks’ estimates ecosystem services and environmental incomes, applying producer, basic and social prices. The accounting frameworks are applied in case studies of sixteen large dehesas of holm oak woodlands in Andalusia, Spain. We measure seven farmers and six government dehesas’ individual ecosystem services and environmental incomes. The dehesas’ refined standard accounts ecosystem services and environmental incomes results at basic prices are, respectively, 0.4 and 0.1 times of those of the values measured by the extended accounts at social prices.