Towards measuring environmental income through a refined United Nations SEEA EA: Application to publicly-owned, protected, pine-forest-farm case studies in Andalusia, Spain

The United Nations monetary System of Environmental-Economic Accounting—Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA) does not recommend the measurement of the environmental incomes of single products from an ecosystem accounting area. The objective of this paper is to uncover the accounting period environmental income given by the environmental operating return embedded in single biological-based products consumed, plus their environmental asset gain, by applying the authors' refined extended monetary accounts of the SEEA EA. The standard System of National Accounts (SNA) and the refined SEEA EA frameworks are applied to 12 protected publicly-owned mixed-pine-forest-farm case studies in Andalusia, Spain. The comparison of results shows that the net value added for the pine-forest farms estimated under the refined SEEA EA is four times greater than that of the standard SNA, indicating the importance of uncovering the exchange values provided by the operating returns on manufactured capitals and environmental assets of products consumed without market prices. After omitting the carbon ecosystem service to avoid double counting, the ecosystem services and changes in the environmental assets made up 68% and 32%, respectively, of the aggregate environmental income from the 11 environmental assets valued in the pine-forest-farm case studies in 2010.