March 2016: The Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES) has highlighted a February 2016 workshop that brought together experts to develop methods to link biodiversity and economics. Participants at the event, which was hosted by the UN Environment Programme – World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) in Cambridge, UK, agreed that biodiversity accounts should include species diversity and trends that channel into ecosystem services, which people value in both biophysical and monetary terms, such as crop pollinators, wildlife and wild-caught fish and game.

Even when imposing a monetary value on biodiversity is not possible, participants agreed that population trends, and their importance to tourism, agriculture, fisheries and other economic sectors, should be tracked, as should trends for endemic species and overall biodiversity, including measuring species’ richness and abundance, and eventually, genetic diversity. These recommendations will be tested in countries that are beginning to build biodiversity accounts, including Colombia, Costa Rica, the Netherlands and Uganda.

In its newsletter, WAVES describes a project undertaken by the Government of the UK, which has published ecosystem accounts for six pilot areas in England and Scotland, highlighting the important role natural areas, especially woodlands, play in ensuring good air quality. The project’s objectives were to explore the use of accounts to monitor ecosystem conditions and service provision, and to test the role of accounting in improving the evidence base for decisions regarding ecosystem asset management and service provision. The accounts calculated the monetary value for different ecosystem services and found that the financial benefits of removing pollutants from the air was greater than the value of other services, including those related to water, crops and recreation. The project, which looked at six protected areas covering coastal, wetland and woodland areas, used the UN System of Environmental Economic Accounting, which accounted for the diverse ecosystems, the amounts of services from these ecosystems and the financial value of the services. The project led to the recommendation that a streamlined data collection process be used, such as standardized, publicly accessible workbooks, to develop a common approach for estimating the physical and monetary benefits of ecosystems.

WAVES has also published a policy briefing on natural capital accounting (NCA) titled, ‘Showing the worth: NCA and the design of payments for ecosystem services.’ The briefing illustrates the importance of NCA for policymakers to: identify who benefits from ecosystems and which economic sectors are better placed to share the cost of protecting them; design payments for ecosystem services (PES) programmes; and determine where investing resources would garner the greatest economic returns. The publication explains that NCA is a “transparent, methodologically robust method” that enables comparisons across time and regions to assess policy impacts, and identifies ways in which NCA can inform the PES agenda, including by: ensuring transparency of supply, demand and productivity of information across sectors; aligning instruments to determine how sectors impact on the economy; and ensuring better information to assess baselines and the impact of investment in natural resources. It also discusses how information on how people benefit from ecosystems, as well as the costs associated with protecting them can improve PES programme design. [WAVES Article on Linking Biodiversity to National Accounts] [WAVES Article on Piloting Ecosystem Accounts in England and Scotland] [Policy Briefing: Showing the worth: NCA and the design of payments for ecosystem services]