Those making and implementing policies and actions on sustainable development need to acknowledge the bounds of the natural world and aim to achieve human well-being on a sustainable planet. This requires systems thinking: an understanding of the complex chain of cause–effect relationships. This new mindset requires operational metrics to enable policymakers to support holistic and sustainable planning. Natural capital accounts (NCAs) can provide such metrics because they use the same concepts, rules and framework as the System of National Accounts (SNA). The SNA describes the economic system and is the primary source of information for economic policies. Once the new NCA metrics are made available, it is necessary to specifically understand how to use them in decision-making processes.
The acronym LISBETH stands for LInking accounts for ecosystem Services and Benefits to the Economy THrough bridging. LISBETH is based on INCA (Integrated system for Natural Capital Accounting) and is meant to facilitate the use of INCA accounts in traditional economic analytical tools. LISBETH is meant to facilitate the use of INCA accounts in traditional economic analytical tools. Several uses of NCAs in decision-making are possible, e.g. they can be directly employed by policymakers and based on relatively easy tools, or they may need to be processed by specialised analysts and integrated into complex modelling tools. Three practical examples are described and commented on this report, expanding on explaining its application.
- The first application shows how to combine crop provision accounts with the conventional accounts related to agricultural products and their trade. Combined account presentations are useful for policymakers, not only for technical analytical purposes but also for communicating with a wider non-technical audience.
- The second application shows how to build consumption-based accounts using multiregional input–output tables; in our example we assess the water purification service embedded in traded crops. Consumption remains in fact the ultimate driver behind production processes.
- The third application shows how to link ecosystem services accounts to general equilibrium models to assess the economic impacts generated by changes in ecosystem services; in our example we address the impact of invasive alien species on pollination and in turn on pollination-dependent crops and their trade.
The three applications provide several insights in terms of their usefulness at different steps of the policy cycle, their feasibility, their technical complexity (and thus the level of skill required) and also in terms of the primary users (from specialised analysts to a non-specialised audience).