Abstract

Valuing nature is important to correctly mainstream natural capital into policies and decision-making, and many European and worldwide initiatives are already advancing on the creation of natural capital accounts. This contribution briefly summarizes these initiatives, discussing their limitations related to the adoption of strict accounting rules for the monetary valuation, which are not applicable to non-market goods. It finally reviews non-market valuation and proposes how to advance the use of this set of techniques to make the estimated values usable at the policy level.