Tags:Ecological Benefits, Natural Capital and Nature-based Restoration
Abstract:
Natural capital stocks are the durable physical or biological elements of nature that persist through time to contribute to current or future economic production. In October of 2022 the White House Office of Science and Technology introduced a national strategy to develop statistics for environmental decision making and proposed creating a system of natural capital accounting and associated environmental-economic statistics. While restoration ecologists have used multiple measures for determining the success of restoration projects, it is important that the measures used represent an accurate accounting of environmental capital stocks and flows produced by nature-based restoration projects, and provide meaningful accounts of natural capital stocks and flows. We have demonstrated natural capital increases for several nature-based environmental restoration projects in Alabama and Louisiana using natural capital accounting techniques. For example, for a living shoreline project in South Mobile County, Alabama we have demonstrated a 4:1 increase in habitat benefits, in terms of marsh and food chain production, and 3:1 BCR on a dollar:dollar basis. This accounting considers both the value of the environmental assets (stocks) of the various ecosystem elements (primary, secondary and tertiary producers standing crop) as well as an estimate of the annual productivity the habitats generate (ecosystem services or flows). We illustrate the increase in natural capital for several current projects including living shorelines , marsh creation and forested wetlands (Pointe aux Chenes) nature based restoration projects. These projects show significant increases in net-natural capital benefits and illustrate the methods used to provide meaningful quantitative measures, which can be used to document the natural capital values of nature based restoration projects.
Quantitative Assessment of Natural Capital for Restoration Projects