Accounting for Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability: Linking Ecosystem Services to Human Well-Being

TLDR

Sustaining natural resources while promoting economic growth and quality of life is a major societal challenge that requires measuring program effectiveness to justify costs, yet linking government actions to environmental outcomes remains complex. The article aims to describe emerging EPA‑led efforts to frame and measure environmental outcomes using ecosystem services and values as meaningful metrics. The authors present a novel, low‑cost method for valuing multiple ecosystem services and discuss emerging research on human well‑being indicators. The method yields relative values for ecosystem services and provides insights into human well‑being indicators.

Abstract

One of society's greatest challenges is to sustain natural resources while promoting economic growth and quality of life. In the face of this challenge, society must measure the effectiveness of programs established to safeguard the environment. The impetus for demonstrating positive results from government-sponsored research and regulation in the United States comes from Congress (General Accountability Office; GAO) and the Executive Branch (Office of Management and Budget; OMB). The message is: regulatory and research programs must demonstrate outcomes that justify their costs. Although the concept is simple, it is a complex problem to demonstrate that environmental research, policies, and regulations cause measurable changes in environmental quality. Even where changes in environmental quality can be tracked reliably, the connections between government actions and environmental outcomes seldom are direct or straightforward. In this article, we describe emerging efforts (with emphasis on the role of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; EPA) to frame and measure environmental outcomes in terms of ecosystem services and values—societally and ecologically meaningful metrics for gauging how well we manage environmental resources. As examples of accounting for outcomes and values, we present a novel, low-cost method for determining relative values of multiple ecosystem services, and describe emerging research on indicators of human well-being.