Environmental Income in the United Nations SEEA Ea 2021 : Application to Conifer Forest Case Studies in Andalusia, Spain

The United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC) adopted the recommended monetary System of Environmental-Economic Accounting – Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA) in March 2021. The explicit aim of the SEEA EA is to highlight ecosystem services and environmental assets of individual economic activities in an ecosystem accounting area. The main objective of this article is to measure enhancement and degradation of environmental assets (CEA) and the CEA adjusted environmental net operating surpluses (NOSead). We show that the NOSead is a sustainable adjusted ecosystem service and an environmental income. The SEEA EA and standard System of National Accounts (SNA) are applied to 12 protected publicly-owned mixed conifer forest farms case studies in Andalusia, Spain. Incomes and environmental assets valued are estimated for 17 and 11 individual economic activities, respectively. The estimated CEA results are due to the discounting effect and the biological productivity enhancements/degradations of the provisioning and regulating-maintenance ecosystem services embedded in future expected total product consumptions. The SEEA EA´s net value added (NVA) at social prices is 4.0 times the SNA´s NVA at producer prices. The SEEA EA ecosystem services contribute 61.3% to the final product consumptions and represent the 95.0% to the environmental incomes. CEA represents 31.7% of environmental incomes