Evaluation of landscape amenity benefits in multifunctional agricultural accounts

Landscape provision is an important service function of agriculture to the rest of society and to nature. Currently, the sector is not rewarded for these amenities (non-commodity goods) and the benefits from the agricultural landscape for society are not included in the conventional economic accounts (EAA).
Landscape provision is part of agriculture’s multifuntionality. Evaluating the sector’s multiple functions and monitoring the related policies require indicators that comprise the sector’s economic value, but also reflect environmental concerns and non-market functions. Therefore, a framework for Economic and Environmental Accounts for Agriculture (EEAA) was developed that extends the conventional EAA with environmental issues, valued in monetary terms. The sector’s private costs and benefits are integrated with external ‘social’ ones, i.e. commodity goods and services with non-commodity ones. As both positive and negative externalities are accounted for, the EEAA enable impact analysis of policy instruments, not only on agricultural income, but also on societal welfare.
For valuing landscape amenities, we rely in the first place on revealed preference studies, using data from other markets to estimate proxies for the non-commodity good and assuming that the agricultural landscape has a value for residents, tourists and recreationists. At least these use values are internalised in the EEAA to account for the benefits from landscape provision. The principal interest of the EEAA lays not as much in the absolute value of each section, but rather in their relative weight and the overall evolution of their share in total cost/benefit over time.