Exploring ecosystem services assessment through Ecological Footprint accounting

Ecosystem services are the benefits that humans derive from Nature. In the last decades, research efforts have been made to better understand the connections between the natural sphere and the human sphere as well as to propose novel approaches to measure the value of ecosystem services. While economic valuation has so far been the most commonly used approach – expressing ecosystem services’ value in monetary units – recent efforts have focused on alternative qualitative or biophysical accounting approaches to express the value of ecosystem service in physical units. The role of Ecological Footprint accounting as a biophysical approach for measuring the value of ecosystem services through a surface-equivalent unit is here investigated. This accounting tool allows keeping track of both the human demand on, and the Nature’s supply of, a precise sub-set of ecosystem services thus being able to make an ecological balance at the country level. A comparison between Ecological Footprint and economic valuation analyses is finally performed, for the forest ecosystem type, to highlight complementarities and correlations of these different approaches.