This article looks at natural capital assets, the flows and values of services – terms that help us think logically about how to measure aspects of the natural world and their impact upon people. Natural capital assets are things that persist long-term, such as mountains or a fish population.

From these assets, people receive a flow of services, such as mountain hikes and fish captured for consumption. We can value the benefit to society of those services by estimating what the hikers spent to enable them to walk over the mountain or any profit from bringing the fish into the market. Applying this logic consistently across assets and services enables us to start building accounts of the UK’s nature.

Where available, estimates are presented between the period 1997 to 2017 and all monetary valuations are given in 2018 prices deflated using the HM Treasury June 2019 GDP deflators. Methods for some services have been developed since the 1997 to 2015 UK Ecosystem Service Accounts. These changes reduce consistency between individual ecosystem services across reports but all figures in this report use the same methods. It is recognised that the UK accounts remain experimental and future UK publications will be subject to methodological improvements. Ecosystem service valuations offer comparative analysis across services whereas physical flows provide information about the changes over time independent of price changes.

The services are presented by type, which include provisioning, regulatory and cultural. Types of service are defined at the beginning of each section.

Click here to read more

No Comment

Comments are closed.