Natural capital and ecosystem services assessment in natural parks and marine protected areas. A proposed framework from the GIREPAM project.

The INTERREG GIREPAM (Integrated Management of Ecological Networks through Marine Protected Areas and Parks) project aims, within the T3 component, at setting up an environmental accounting framework for the evaluation of natural capital and ecosystem services (ES).Building upon the outcomes from the National Environmental Accounting of Marine Protected Areas (EAMPA) project and upon the second national report on natural capital, issued by the Italian Ministry where an environmental accounting assessment ofMarine Protected Areas is provided, a framework for coastal areas of natural parks and marine protected areas is set up and tested on some pilot cases in the context of the GIREPAM project, with a view to spreading knowledge and providing practical management tools to make the tangible and intangible value of nature emerge at the European level.Within the EAMPA project, a multidisciplinary approach, embracing both ecological and economic accounting, combined in an integrated assessment, was used to assess the value of existing natural capital as well as the costs and benefits of ecosystem services fruition within MPAs.The proposed framework is innovative on two levels. First, the assessment of natural capital and ecosystem services value is performed not only using a user side approach, typical of the neoclassical economic approach, but also a donor side perspective, which makes it possible to estimate the effort made by nature to generate and maintainthem. Second, the outcomes from the entire process, from ecosystems to ES assessment, are mapped so as to provide decision makers with a useful and communicative tool.Within the GIREPAM context, the Asinara National Park and the Portofino Marine Protected Area have been selected as case studies to test cutting-edge methods for ecological and economic valuation as well as ecosystem types characterisation in the context of the proposed framework.