Ecosystem Services and Global Trade of Natural Resources

10  Ecosystem Services in Green National Accounting

Jean-Louis Weber

Introduction

Implementing international mechanisms for involving markets in the protection of ecosystems and secure sustainable supply of their services over time requires accounting for expected benefits and options as well as for costs for meeting them. Because they reflect economy’s relation to nature in a very limited way, national accounts as they are presented today are not likely to be helpful in that respect.

The need for accounting for the environment and natural resources is certainly not a new vision. Without going back as far as the eighteenth century to the French Physiocrats, whose “economic table” assumed that agriculture alone could increase and multiply wealth ...