A new report by Eurostat and the Joint Research Centre, published on 25 June by the European Commission, analyses the economic value of the ecosystem services provided by forests, rivers, grasslands, wetlands and other ecosystems and how restoring degraded ecosystems can double nature’s contribution to the EU economy and society.
Despite the crucial role of ecosystems, there are currently no established and regular measures of their condition or of the quantity of services they provide.
The study, funded by the EU’s INCA project, aims to fill this gap by proposing an integrated European system of ecosystem accounts. This will enable scientists, statisticians and policy makers to learn how ecosystems and their services support society, what changes have taken place in the EU over the last two decades and how this can be measured in a standardised and comparable way.
In March, the European Commission announced plans to revise the European Environmental Economic Accounts (EEAA) Regulation to include a new module on accounting for natural capital (see EUROPE 12676/33). The EEAA is a statistical instrument of key importance for the development and monitoring of effective European environmental policy, and the European Court of Auditors recommended in 2019 that the timeliness of the data be improved (see EUROPE 12347/9).
See the report: https://bit.ly/2U7BWRw (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)