Australia's natural environment is worth billions of dollars for its contribution to the country's economic and social wellbeing, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics' (ABS) first-ever measure of the nation's ecosystems in economic terms.
The National Ecosystem Accounts, released on Thursday, shows the most valuable service provided by Australia's ecosystems in 2020-21 was climate regulation.
Carbon storage was integral to climate regulation, with the naturally occurring removal of greenhouse gases by plants and organisms priced at over $40 billion.
Grasslands, native forests and savannas collectively stored over 34.5 million kilotonnes of carbon, said ABS' head of environment statistics Jonathan Khoo.
Grazed biomass is another key service, found to save farmers $40.4 billion by providing natural feed for sheep and cattle.
The accounts covered the entire Australian territory, measuring land, freshwater and marine environments.
Naturally occurring surface water used for drinking and energy production was valued at $1.4 billion, and the growth of wild fish that are caught and sold at $39.2 million.
The release also revealed how natural landscapes protect coastlines, with ecosystems such as coral reefs, sandbanks, dunes and mangroves possess the ability to defend against tidal and storm surges.
These estimates also provide an opportunity for Australia's national accounts to include the value lost from damaged ecosystems for the first time.
In an article for The Conversation, John Hawkins, a senior lecturer at the University of Canberra's school of politics, explained the importance of that inclusion.
He said that despite the value of timber production "cutting trees down also produces a loss — it no longer provides 'services' such as filtering water and preventing soil erosion".
Hawkins said these economic assessments of the environment could then be used to direct government regulation of industries that rely on natural resources.
"Governments might then be able to charge a logging company a licence fee — decide the forest is too valuable to allow logging at all, or the fee may just be set too high for any company to find it profitable to log it," he wrote in The Conversation.
The ABS expects to update the ecosystem accounts annually.
It says this will allow a "deeper understanding" of the support nature provides our societies, leading "to more informed and sustainable decision-making".
