National-scale analysis assesses ecosystem services in Italy, revealing challenges in data quality and policy support.
This paper presents a first national-scale application of Regulation (EU) 2024/3024 on ecosystem accounts, focusing on the physical quantification of seven ecosystem services in Italy. It describes the development of pilot accounts using the Eurostat guidelines and applying the INCA tool. Spatial data and official statistics are integrated to assess ecosystem contributions, enabling a disaggregation by ecosystem type and land cover. The results highlight both the methodological feasibility and the data limitations, particularly regarding spatial resolution and national specificity. The accounting approach reveals the distinct role of ecosystems in providing biophysical outputs, clarifying their contribution compared to human inputs. The analysis also confirms that accounting tables and maps can support policy integration, spatial planning and the assessment of sustainability trade-offs. The study contributes to the implementation of ecosystem accounting in Europe, offering insights for future improvements in data quality and institutional cooperation.
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Mascolo et al. (2025) studied this question.
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