Land use inventory as framework for environmental accounting

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The methodology here proposed, by providing reliable estimates and well-defined levels of staistical uncertainty for assessing stocks and flows of land use at national level, can support also other kinds of environmental assessment. The future challenge for land use inventory lies in shifting the focus from a straightforward quantification of land use stocks and flows to targeting the analysis on key questions for sustainable development policies. Notably, the frontier is national environmental-economic accounting to frame policy action toward a greener growth. The purpose of environmental-economic accounting is to assess the sustainability of the economy-ecosystem interaction not only in terms of conventional indicators like gross domestic product (GDP), but taking into account the material or energy resource input (and waste generation) to produce one unit of GDP and associated impacts on depletion of natural capital and of related ecosystem services, like carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, water supply. In such a perspective, multi-temporal land use inventories are going to gain importance, as they provide the key information on land use stocks and flows (ha of land cover consumption and formation) required to develop accounting systems for measuring ecosystem capital degradation (e.g., GHGs emissions, overexploitation of biological resources, waste disposal).

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