Environmental accounting of natural capital and ecosystem services for the US National Forest System

The National Forests of the United States encompass 192.7 million acres (78 million hectares) of land, which is nearly five percent of the total land area of the nation. These lands are managed by the US Forest Service (USFS) for multiple uses, including extraction of timber, production of fossil fuels and minerals, public recreation, and the preservation of biodiversity, clean air, water, and soils. The USFS is interested in valuing the natural capital within, and the ecosystem services provided by, their lands. This is in part to justify expenditures in a time of limited resources. We used emergy and an environmental accounting approach, to quantify the ecosystem services, the exported environmental goods and information provided by National Forest System (NFS) lands, and the natural capital residing on those lands. Environmental accounting using emergy provides a method to value these flows of services and storages of capital using a common biophysical unit, the solar emjoule and its monetary equivalent the emdollar. We compare emdollar values to economic values gleaned from the literature. In 2005, the ecosystem services provided by USFS lands were equivalent to 197 billion emdollars, and the value of NFS natural capital was 24.3 trillion emdollars. Our evaluation suggests that the Federal Government budget allocation for the NFS ($5.55E+09 in 2005) was well spent, protecting 24.3 trillion emdollars in natural capital and insuring annual ecosystem services totaling 197 billion emdollars. Monetary values for some natural capital and ecosystem services are similar to emergy-derived values (resources like fish, wildlife, water, and firewood extracted from forests), and others are widely different (biodiversity, fossil, and mineral resources). There is large uncertainty associated with computing the environment’s contributions to society whether using emergy or accepted economic techniques; yet, the magnitude of these emergy-derived estimates suggests that even with the uncertainty, the values are significant and monetary expenditures for the Forest Service are justified.

[1]  Howard T. Odum,et al.  Environmental Accounting: Emergy and Environmental Decision Making , 1995 .

[2]  Howard T. Odum,et al.  The Energetic Basis for Valuation of Ecosystem Services , 2000, Ecosystems.

[3]  D. Schluter,et al.  The Latitudinal Gradient in Recent Speciation and Extinction Rates of Birds and Mammals , 2007, Science.

[4]  J. Sedell,et al.  Water and the Forest Service , 2000 .

[5]  Gordon E. Grant,et al.  Sediment transport and channel morphology of small, forested streams , 2005 .

[6]  J. Loomis,et al.  The total economic value of threatened, endangered and rare species: An updated meta-analysis , 2009 .

[7]  J. Miller.  Ground water atlas of the United States , 1993 .

[8]  Michael J. Oimoen,et al.  The National Elevation Dataset , 2002 .

[9]  THE FOREST RESOURCES OF THE UNITED STATES. , 1896, Science.

[10]  S. Doherty,et al.  Emergy evaluations of and limits to forest production , 1995 .

[11]  C. Perry,et al.  Forest Resources of the United States, 2007 , 2009 .

[12]  Christopher B. Field,et al.  FOREST CARBON SINKS IN THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE , 2002 .

[13]  A. Lugo,et al.  Tropical Forests: Management and Ecology , 1995, Ecological Studies.

[14]  J. Farley,et al.  Ecological Economics : Principles and Applications , 2016 .

[15]  Joel Huber,et al.  The Economic Value of Water Quality , 2008 .

[16]  D. Tilley,et al.  EMERGY-based environmental systems assessment of a multi-purpose temperate mixed-forest watershed of the southern Appalachian Mountains, USA. , 2003, Journal of environmental management.

[17]  H. Odum.  Tropical Forest Systems and the Human Economy , 1995 .

[18]  Javier Uche,et al.  Emergy analysis applied to the estimation of the recovery of costs for water services under the European Water Framework Directive , 2010 .

[19]  D. Pimentel,et al.  Economic and Environmental Benefits of Biodiversity , 1997 .

[20]  Sergio Ulgiati,et al.  Assessing geobiosphere work of generating global reserves of coal, crude oil, and natural gas , 2011 .

[21]  W. Reid,et al.  Millennium Ecosystem Assessment , 2005 .

[22]  Wesley W. Ingwersen,et al.  Species diversity in the Florida Everglades, USA: A systems approach to calculating biodiversity , 2006, Aquatic Sciences.

[23]  D. Rogers.  EMERGY-based environmental systems assessment of a multi-purpose temperate mixed-forest watershed of the southern , 2003 .

[24]  J. Martínez-Alier,et al.  Series Editor: , 2007 .

[25]  Cutler J. Cleveland,et al.  Encyclopedia of Energy , 2004 .

[26]  L. Venkatachalam.  The contingent valuation method: a review , 2004 .

[27]  J. Miller.  Ground water atlas of the United States , 1993 .

[28]  Harold M. Mayer,et al.  National Atlas of the United States. , 1958 .