Exploring ecosystem services assessment through Ecological Footprint accounting

Ecosystem services are the benefits that humans derive from Nature. In the last decades, research efforts have been made to better understand the connections between the natural sphere and the human sphere as well as to propose novel approaches to measure the value of ecosystem services. While economic valuation has so far been the most commonly used approach – expressing ecosystem services’ value in monetary units – recent efforts have focused on alternative qualitative or biophysical accounting approaches to express the value of ecosystem service in physical units.