Measuring environmental incomes beyond standard national and ecosystem accounting frameworks: testing and comparing the agroforestry Accounting System in a holm oak dehesa case study in Andalusia-Spain

The standard System of National Accounts (SNA) omits the costs of the environmental inputs from nature and the environmental fixed asset degradation from the national/sub-national natural working landscapes. The United Nations Statistic Division (UNSD) is currently drafting the standardization of the Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (EEA), as part of the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA). The EEA- aims to mitigate some of the limitations of the SNA by extending the concept of economic activity and explicitly incorporating ecosystem services and environmental assets provided by nature in the estimates of net value added, adjusted according to the costs of the environmental inputs consumed and the environmental fixed asset degradations of ecosystem. However, the NVAad proposed in the ongoing draft of the EEA is inconsistent in that it omits the manufactured costs of the public economic activities of the new government institutional sub-sector of the ecosystem trustee. In addition, the ongoing methodological guidelines of the EEA do not propose to estimate the environmental income. This implies that there is not a single indicator that integrates the ecosystem services obtained and the evolution of the environmental assets in the natural working landscapes in which the private and public activities are valued. The objective of this research is to discuss conceptually and compare the measurements of ecosystem services and environmental incomes in the extended Agroforestry Accounting System (AAS), and in refined versions of the official SNA and the ongoing EEA methodologies, through a case study of privately-owned holm oak dehesas working landscapes in Andalusia-Spain. This comparison shows that the refined SNA and the refined EEA in their current state of development do not allow the complete visualization of the environmental income contribution to the total income of the natural working landscapes. We also discuss the advances provided by the AAS extended accounting methodology that would be relevant for the EEA next improvements.