Key points

The UK Natural Capital Accounts (NCAs) produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) take a range of ecosystem services and aim to value, in monetary terms, the benefits they bring to society. Within the UK NCAs, data is available for Scotland on the “annual value” and overall lifetime “asset value” to the Scottish economy of sixteen ecosystem services, split into three broad categories: 

• Provisioning services - material outputs such as fish, timber and fossil fuels
• Regulating services - that help to maintain the quality of the environment, such as greenhouse gas regulation, air pollution removal and noise mitigation
• Cultural services - such as recreation, tourism and aesthetics

The NCAs should be interpreted as a minimum value of the services provided by the natural environment as not all services can be monetised, such as pollination or flood protection.

Annual value of natural capital

• In 2022, the total annual value of ecosystem services in Scotland was estimated to be £38.7 billion, or £5.9 billion when oil and gas is excluded. As such, Scotland contributes 44% of the total UK annual value including oil and gas, or 12% excluding oil and gas.

• Provisioning services accounted for 94% of Scotland’s annual value in 2022, predominantly oil and gas (£32.8 billion), followed by renewable electricity (£1.2 billion), and water (£1.0 billion).
• Cultural ecosystem services had an annual value of £2.3 billion in 2022. This included health benefits from recreation (£0.9 billion) and outdoor recreation and tourism (£0.9 billion).
• Regulating ecosystem services had a net annual value of £0.1 billion in 2022. Air pollution removal had the highest annual value of the regulating services, worth £0.1 billion in avoided health impacts.

Physical flow of natural capital

• The provision of renewable electricity has almost doubled from 17,575 gigawatt hours in 2016 to 33,332 gigawatt hours in 2022. Oil and gas provisioning fell from 75 to 65 million tonnes of oil equivalent but its annual value, in monetary terms, increased around 6-fold from £5.4 billion to £32.8 billion.

Asset value of natural capital

• The natural capital asset value for Scotland in 2022 was an estimated £254.7 billion including oil and gas, or £142.2 billion when oil and gas is excluded. This measures the stock of ecosystem services and takes into consideration their future expected supply.