Counting Nature: Ecosystem Services Move Into National and Corporate Accounts

An intact, species-rich natural environment underpins human life, delivering clean water, food, materials and space for recreation and experience. Yet while environmental reports have long acknowledged the services that functioning ecosystems provide, natural capital has hardly featured in economic calculations or on company balance sheets. Researchers writing in the journal One Ecosystem, as part of the German project “Appreciating biodiversity – modernising economic accounting in Germany” (Bio-Mo-D), argue that this blind spot must be closed. Their analysis, published in September 2024, examines how biodiversity and ecosystem services can be woven into economic reporting at both governmental and corporate levels, a change being pushed internationally by the United Nations, the World Bank and the European Commission. Without such accounting, they contend, nature will never receive sufficient weight in political and economic decision-making.

The urgency is not abstract. Despite decades of nature conservation tradition, particularly in Germany, and a raft of international biodiversity strategies, there have been no major improvements in avoiding species extinction or the loss of landscape diversity. A key milestone came in March 2021, when the UN Statistical Commission adopted the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting – Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA) as an international statistical standard. The framework provides detailed guidance on measuring the extent and condition of ecosystems and quantifying the services they supply. Even so, the authors describe a “double ignorance”: outside individual cases, the risks biodiversity loss poses to the economy remain unknown across sectors, while the contribution of nature’s services to well-being and prosperity is systematically underestimated, both in importance and in monetary value.

The scale of that underestimation is striking. In industrialised countries, up to half of GDP relies on biodiversity and intact ecosystems, according to the World Economic Forum, alongside services that secure livelihoods, well-being and cultural development. Yet Germany’s national accounts, the federal government’s annual economic reports, the assessments of the German Council of Economic Experts and the models of most economic forecasters have all largely ignored ecosystems and their services. The drivers of change are now converging from several directions: alternative growth and prosperity discourses under the “Beyond GDP” banner, international biodiversity strategies, developments within environmental-economic accounting, and a fast-moving business nature-reporting agenda.

Germany’s Federal Statistical Office is building a new data infrastructure that could anchor this shift. Its Ecosystem Atlas, published online, maps the diversity and distribution of the country’s ecosystems at municipal, district and state level, with overview maps at 100-metre resolution and downloadable georeferenced data. The Ecosystem Extent Account, previously compiled for 2015, 2018 and 2021, is now in continuous production, based on a national classification system comprising 74 classes, 21 groups and six divisions. The Ecosystem Condition Account, first published in 2023, describes the capacity, stability, integrity and resilience of ecosystems according to SEEA EA specifications. Balances of selected ecosystem services are being compiled for successive release from 2025, first in physical terms and later in monetary ones, with seven services set to become mandatory across the EU under Regulation 691/2011, including crop and wood provision, climate regulation, air filtration, pollination and nature-based tourism.

The German data landscape supporting these accounts is already rich. Freely accessible datasets such as CORINE Land Cover and the LUCAS survey provide land-use information, while the Digital Land-Cover Model for Germany is updated every three years. Indicator systems range from the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals and the UBA’s roughly 50 environmental indicators to the European Environment Agency’s 34-item SEBI set. A particularly important measure is the German government’s “species diversity and landscape quality” indicator, which tracks the population trends of 51 bird species representing the country’s main habitat types. The latest figures show deterioration: the aggregate value fell from 79.5 per cent in 2010 to 75.3 per cent in 2019, with the agricultural sub-indicator dropping sharply from 83.0 to 69.9 per cent. A nationwide indicator biotope value, based on legally recognised biotope value points from the Federal Compensation Ordinance, is being developed to enable monetary valuation of ecosystems’ contribution to biodiversity conservation.

Corporate reporting is undergoing an even more dramatic transformation, driven by European regulation. Under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, in force since 1 January 2024, roughly 40,000 companies in the EU, including about 15,000 in Germany, must regularly monitor, evaluate and transparently disclose the risks, dependencies and impacts of their activities on biological diversity, across their own operations and their supply and value chains. The directive’s biodiversity standard, ESRS E4, demands a holistic view covering species, ecosystems, ecosystem services and drivers of nature loss, and implements the concept of double materiality in binding law for the first time: companies must report both their impact on nature and their dependence upon it.

Technically, ESRS E4-compliant biodiversity reporting splits into four interconnected accounting systems. Impact driver accounting quantifies the pressures economic activities place on nature, using metrics such as cubic metres of water consumed, hectares of land used or tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted, with frameworks like the Natural Capital Protocol and the Value Balancing Alliance methodology guiding implementation. Ecosystem accounting, by contrast, describes the resulting changes in nature itself, though in corporate practice it often relies on consolidated indicators such as Mean Species Abundance due to the effort of site-specific analysis across value chains. Dependency accounting examines how a company is influenced by ecosystems – the power plant needing cool, clean water, the farm reliant on insect pollination – while nature-related risks and opportunities accounting translates these relationships into financial terms, distinguishing transition risks from regulation and social pressure, physical risks from failing dependencies, and systemic risks aggregated across sectors and economies.

National ecosystem accounts and corporate sustainability reporting are designed to complement each other, and the researchers see real synergies, though not yet fully exploited. The CSRD’s biodiversity standard explicitly refers to the SEEA EA framework and recommends it as guidance for metrics on ecosystem extent and condition. Germany’s Ecosystem Atlas, with its 100-metre resolution and three-yearly updates, can help companies carry out the initial materiality assessments required by the directive, identifying ecosystems potentially affected by their activities or those of their suppliers. But the differences are substantial. National accounts prioritise statistical coherence across the whole country, rejecting datasets with inconsistent coverage even if locally more accurate, whereas companies must report annually, at site-specific resolution, and across global supply chains that national data simply do not cover. National reporting also excludes monitoring of individual species and habitats, forcing companies to draw on sources such as the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation’s protected-area data. As the SEEA EA framework is currently being implemented by 41 countries, global coverage will take time.

The researchers frame the whole enterprise as a social innovation rather than a purely technical or statistical exercise, and their stakeholder analysis reveals an emerging advocacy coalition spanning science, government, finance and civil society. Scientific institutions such as the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development, the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research and the Thünen Institute supply methods and data; the Federal Ministry for the Environment and the BfN provide political backing; the Federal Statistical Office handles operational implementation. On the demand side, ministries want to embed the results in the national biodiversity strategy and the annual economic report, NGOs such as WWF and NABU act as multipliers, and the financial sector is increasingly treating biodiversity loss as a stability risk – the Network for Greening the Financial System warned in 2022 of dangers not just for individual firms but for the financial stability of countries, and the Deutsche Bundesbank has since created a dedicated Green Finance department. Resistance exists, too, with some environmental groups and political actors sceptical of monetising nature, a tension the authors acknowledge openly.

The stakes, the authors argue, amount to a potential social tipping point. If ecosystem services are successfully integrated into reporting, prosperity itself could be redefined, shifting investment not only into productive and human capital but equally into intact ecosystems and diverse living landscapes. Germany’s draft National Biodiversity Strategy 2030 already commits to making biodiversity and natural capital indicators an integral part of federal economic and welfare reporting from 2026, alongside a planned “natural capital check” for legal and planning decisions and the integration of natural capital approaches into university curricula. The narrative, the researchers conclude, is changing: economics is increasingly concerned with natural assets, and ecosystem accounting can show whether biodiversity goals are being met or missed. The task now is to ensure that the data flows not only from statisticians but into the hands of decision-makers, companies and the public – because only what is counted tends to be protected.

Subject of Research: Integration of ecosystem services and biodiversity into national economic accounting and corporate sustainability reporting

Article Title: The future of economic reporting: ecosystem services and biodiversity in government and corporate accounting

Article References: Grunewald, K., Zieschank, R., Förster, J., Hansjürgens, B., & Wildner, T. (2024). The future of economic reporting: ecosystem services and biodiversity in government and corporate accounting. One Ecosystem, 9, Article e131326. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.9.e131326

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/oneeco.9.e131326

Keywords: ecosystem services, biodiversity, natural capital, SEEA EA, CSRD, ESRS E4, ecosystem accounting, corporate sustainability reporting, Germany, Beyond GDP, economic reporting, sustainable finance