Measuring Environmental Incomes: System Of National Accounts And Agroforestry Accounting System Applied To Cork Oak Open Woodlands In Andalusia, Spain

This study’s objective is to estimate and compare spatially explicit measures of ecosystem services and total environmental incomes for individual activities which occur in 248,015 hectares of cork oak open woodlands in Andalusia, Spain. The activities include timber, cork, firewood, nuts, grazing, conservation forestry, residential accommodation, private amenity, fire services, water supply, mushroom, carbon, free access recreation, landscape conservation and threatened wild biodiversity preservation. Ecosystem service is an economic indicator that informs of nature’s contribution to the period’s human product consumption, but with an uncertain meaning of ecological sustainability. We show that environmental income is the maximum period consumption of sustainable ecosystem services with both ecological and economic significance only if the benefits and costs involved in sustainable silvicultural management scenarios are accounted for. For measuring environmental incomes, we model sustainable silvicultural management scenarios, considering all the management practices required to maintain cork oak woodlands in perpetuity. Micro farm data is needed to estimate voluntary land and livestock owners’ opportunity cost by individual activity as well as for their subsequent transfer to be able to estimate individual’s environmental incomes values at social price. We define, for each individual activity, the social price as the basic price plus the voluntary unitary opportunity cost incurred by farmers in the scheduled management. Economic ecosystems indicators are measured using refined standard national accounts and extended environmental-economic accounts. The cork oak open woodlands’ ecosystem services and environmental incomes measured by extended accounts at basic prices in 2010 are 1.1 and 1.2 times higher than those estimated at social prices, respectively. The refined standard accounts’ ecosystem services and environmental incomes measured at basic prices are, respectively, 0.3 and 0.2 times those estimated by the extended accounts at social prices.