Abstract
Biodiversity underpins the supply of ecosystem services essential for well-being and economic development, yet biodiversity loss continues at a substantial rate. Linking biodiversity indicators with national economic accounts provides a means of mainstreaming biodiversity into economic planning and monitoring processes. Here we examine the various strategies for biodiversity indicators to be linked into national economic accounts, specifically the System of Environmental-Economic Accounts Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EEA) framework. We present what has been achieved in practice, using various case studies from across the world. These case studies demonstrate the potential of economic accounting as an integrating, mainstreaming framework that explicitly considers biodiversity. With the right indicators for the different components of biodiversity and scales of biological organisation, this can directly support more holistic economic planning approaches. This will be a significant step forward from relying on the traditional indicators of national economic accounts to guide national planning. It is also essential if society’s objectives for biodiversity and sustainable development are to be met.
1. Introduction
The importance of biodiversity to human well-being is well established (e.g., via IPBES, 2019; MA, 2005; TEEB, 2010) and enshrined in multiple international commitments (e.g., the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) Aichi Targets). Many of the biological entities constituting biodiversity, including individual species, contribute directly to human well-being (e.g., fisheries, non-timber forest products, wildlife watching and pollination). More generally, biodiversity as a whole is key to maintaining ‘ecosystem functioning’ (Devictor et al., 2010; Díaz et al., 2007; Hooper et al., 2005) and, in turn, indirectly supplying a broad set of ecosystem services that benefit people (Balvanera et al., 2014, 2006; Cardinale et al., 2012; Tilman et al., 2006). Biodiversity is also critical in maintaining ecosystem services flows during times of disturbance or stress that ecosystems may experience, for example, climate variability, pollution incidents or fires. This resilience is achieved via ‘functional redundancy,’ where different aspects of biodiversity (e.g., species) can perform similar ecosystem functions, but are affected by disturbance in different ways (Elmqvist et al., 2003; Mori et al., 2013).
6. Conclusions
This paper highlights multiple entry points for biodiversity data in the core biophysical accounts of the SEEA EEA. It argues the importance of Species Accounts for integrating this component of biodiversity in to the SEEA-EEA. This will better inform management of the supply of ecosystem services directly related to species and the myriad of services that arise via the interactions of species with the abiotic environment.
