Italy pilots EU ecosystem accounts: counting nature’s services from timber to tourism

Italy has become the first European country to run a full national-scale test of the European Union’s new ecosystem accounting law, and the results offer a revealing portrait of how much the country’s forests, farmlands and green infrastructure quietly deliver to its economy every year. The pilot study, published in the journal One Ecosystem, applies Regulation (EU) 2024/3024 — the legislation that formally inserts ecosystem accounting into the European environmental-economic accounts — to quantify seven ecosystem services in physical units across the entire national territory. It is a rehearsal for the official reporting deadline at the end of 2026, when every Member State must submit its first accounts to Eurostat.

The regulation is a landmark in environmental statistics. It amends Regulation (EU) 691/2011 and aligns with the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting – Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA), the international statistical standard adopted by the United Nations in 2021. Under the new framework, Member States are required to compile standardised supply and use tables for seven mandated services: wood provision, crop provision, crop pollination, global climate regulation, local climate regulation, air filtration and recreation-related services. Each service must be documented in physical units, disaggregated by ecosystem type and by economic sector of use, using a combination of Earth observation data, environmental monitoring, administrative records and modelling techniques. The goal is to make ecosystem contributions visible in the same statistical architecture that tracks GDP and employment — a structural change in how nations measure prosperity.

To coordinate the work, Italy established an inter-institutional task force under the leadership of ISTAT, the national statistical office, bringing together ISPRA (the environmental protection and research institute), CREA, AGEA, CNR and academic experts. ISPRA played the central role in developing the biophysical estimates, applying the INCA tool — the Integrated system for Natural Capital Accounting developed by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. The INCA tool operates as a hybrid system: for some services it supplies standardised European default datasets, such as land-cover maps and carbon stock tables, while for others it allows or requires custom national inputs, such as forest inventories or agricultural production statistics. In this first pilot, the outputs still rely largely on European defaults, a constraint that shapes the precision of every result.

The numbers themselves are striking. Italy’s forests and woodlands supplied 30,018.58 thousand cubic metres of wood in 2021, measured as the net annual increment in cultivated forests — gross growth minus natural mortality — with the entire volume attributed to intermediate consumption by the forestry and wood processing industries. Crop provision reached approximately 55.45 million tonnes of harvested biomass, distributed across fruits (17.2 million tonnes), cereals (16.3 million tonnes), vegetables (13.7 million tonnes), oil-bearing crops (3.5 million tonnes) and sugar crops and roots or tubers (around 3.3 million tonnes). The entire supply came from cropland ecosystems, and the whole flow was recorded as intermediate consumption by the agricultural sector, consistent with the SEEA EA principle that services are recorded at the first point of use rather than downstream in the supply chain.

Pollination produced perhaps the most ecologically revealing results. The model-based approach, which overlays CORINE land-cover data with habitat suitability indices, pollinator activity corrections based on temperature and solar irradiance, and distance-based foraging constraints, attributed 145.2 million tonnes of pollination-dependent crop output to wild pollinators — excluding managed honeybees by definition. Cropland itself supplied about 73% of the service, but forests and woodlands contributed a further 31.7 million tonnes, underscoring their role in hosting wild pollinators near productive farmland. Apples alone accounted for over 43 million tonnes of use, nearly a third of the total, followed by oil-bearing crops and citrus. Notably, settlements and artificial areas contributed 1.79 million tonnes, suggesting that urban green infrastructure provides measurable pollinator habitat beyond traditional agricultural zones.

Climate regulation revealed the sharpest methodological lesson of the entire exercise. Under the gross carbon retention method, forests and woodlands retained approximately 883.8 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalents in 2021, with cropland contributing 936.9 million tonnes and grasslands 99.9 million tonnes. But under the net sequestration method — which subtracts emissions from uptake, following greenhouse gas inventory standards — forests sequestered only 7.9 million tonnes net, a difference of over 99%. Grasslands contributed just 0.9 million tonnes and all other ecosystems reported zero, indicating that emissions from degradation, drainage or land management fully offset natural uptake in many areas. The comparison illustrates why the two indicators are complementary: retention captures the stability of long-term carbon stocks, relevant for biodiversity-linked strategies, while net sequestration reflects actual biosphere-atmosphere fluxes, indispensable for compliance reporting and carbon neutrality pathways.

Local climate regulation and air filtration brought the accounting into the realm of public health. The total cooling service was recorded as 0.6725 degree-days of avoided heat stress, with cropland contributing 0.3418°C and forests 0.2418°C — together over 85% of the national cooling potential — while settlements contributed 0.0491°C through urban vegetation. The service was attributed entirely to household final consumption, reflecting its non-market, collective nature. Air filtration showed ecosystems removing approximately 224.2 thousand tonnes of PM2.5 and 263.2 thousand tonnes of PM10 in 2021, with cropland (107.5 and 121.8 thousand tonnes respectively) and forests (84.7 and 100.2 thousand tonnes) as the dominant contributors. Again, households were the sole beneficiaries, framing air purification as a public health service delivered by vegetated landscapes in both rural and urban contexts.

Recreation-related services exposed the sensitivity of accounting to spatial assumptions. Measured through overnight stays allocated to ecosystems by recreational suitability and accessibility, the extended allocation approach (Method D1) reported 289.2 million overnight stays, nearly twice the 148.7 million produced by the refined, filtered approach (Method D2). D1 emphasised forests and semi-natural habitats, highlighting their multifunctionality, while D2 shifted weight towards cropland and artificial areas near tourism infrastructure. Both methods assigned the service to households and exports, consistent with the treatment of recreation as a final consumption benefit — and both reinforce Italy’s global role as a nature-based tourism destination.

The pilot’s honest assessment of data limitations may prove as valuable as the results themselves. The INCA tool’s 100-metre spatial resolution sets the benchmark for accuracy, but national datasets aligned with accounting needs remain scarce: crop types lack spatial distribution data, making the pollination model imprecise; carbon density and land-cover change data are missing at national granularity; and urban vegetation structure data are too coarse to capture fine-scale temperature variations. The study argues that merging national forest inventory data with detailed land-cover maps, using agricultural parcel registries for bottom-up crop modelling, incorporating citizen-science observations of pollinators, and aligning estimates with LULUCF reporting would all materially improve future accounts. Collaboration with regional forestry agencies and protected area statistics would strengthen recreation estimates.

Beyond the technical achievement, the pilot demonstrates that ecosystem accounts, even when experimental, can already inform spatial planning, urban greening strategies and environmental equity debates. The exclusive allocation of regulating services to households draws attention to public health co-benefits and distributional questions that connect ecosystem accounting to policy agendas beyond the environmental domain. The authors conclude that ecosystem accounting is methodologically complex but analytically rich and policy-relevant, and that progress will depend not only on technical refinement but also on institutional innovation and open methodological debate among Member States. As Europe’s deadline approaches, Italy’s first test offers both a template and a warning: the framework works, but its precision will only be as good as the national data infrastructure each country builds beneath it.

Subject of Research: Ecosystem accounting

Article Title: Towards National Ecosystem Accounts: a first application of EU Regulation 2024/3024 in Italy

Article References: Mascolo, R. A., Boschetto, R. G., & Capriolo, A. (2025). Towards National Ecosystem Accounts: a first application of EU Regulation 2024/3024 in Italy. One Ecosystem, 10, Article e161992. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.10.e161992

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/oneeco.10.e161992

Keywords: ecosystem accounting, SEEA EA, EU Regulation 2024/3024, ecosystem services, natural capital, Italy, INCA tool, environmental statistics, Towards, National, Ecosystem, Accounts