ABSTRACT
Part III looks beyond economic concerns considering the economy as embedded in the human environment. It treats the preservation of nature as a stand-alone issue of ecological sustainability. Chapter 6 evaluates biophysical indicators for assessing nature’s benefits. After discussing the availability of natural wealth the chapter explores measuring the pressure of human activity on the natural environment. Pressures of material flows may or may not generate actual impacts. Indices like the Ecological Footprint seek therefore to assess directly environmental impact. Lacking a common numeraire, non-monetary measures (of weight or area) cover these impacts at best partially. Surrogates of energy use and carbon accumulation that affect climate change are proxies. Despite claims to the contrary, they cannot assess environmental benefits or damage comprehensively. Monetary values of system-inherent “eco-prices” look intriguing for evaluating ecosystem services; they suffer from a lack of data beyond local levels and from generating relative values only. All in all, the aggregation problem looms large in physical measures of environmental change.
