Original title: Tracking nature dependencies and nature-related risks: integrated environmental-economic accounting in Australia
Crystal Bradley, Sarah Taylor, Michael Vardon, Mitchell Lyons +2 · September 2026
Our economy and wellbeing rely heavily on healthy ecosystems, but standard economic reports ignore this connection. Because of this, traditional statistics fail to show how damaged nature threatens human production and life. To fix this blind spot, researchers examined how to link two systems: standard national economic accounts and the United Nations System of Environmental-Economic Accounting. This environmental framework measures natural stocks and the benefits people get from nature, called ecosystem services. Ecosystem services serve as the primary bridge connecting ecosystems to economic activities. For the data to connect smoothly, both systems must share matching categories, which the authors call material join keys. When applied to Australia, the researchers found that current accounts track some of the most critical and threatened dependencies, but only partially. To fix these gaps, Australia needs new priority accounts focused on health, climate resilience, supply chain resilience, and water and food security.
Imagine you run a bakery and you track every dollar spent on flour, rent, and wages, but you never write down how much flour you have left or when the next delivery arrives. You know your costs, but you cannot see the risk of running out. Now suppose you start a second notebook that records flour inventory and delivery schedules, using the same product names as your cost ledger. That second notebook is the ecosystem service account, and matching the names is the material join key. In this paper, the authors check whether Australia already has that second notebook for its natural resources and find it is half-finished—it tracks some things but not the ones most likely to run out.
Governments and businesses make trillion-dollar decisions using economic statistics that ignore the ecosystems those decisions depend on. This paper shows how to fix that gap with a standardised accounting system, and finds that Australia already has some of the pieces but is missing critical ones for water, food, health, and supply chains. Getting the numbers right means nature stops being invisible in policy.
The abstract does not report empirical results from applying the full linked system; it presents a gap analysis based on existing accounts. It does not quantify the size of nature-related risks or test whether the proposed new accounts would actually change decision-making. The analysis is specific to Australia, so the gaps and priorities may differ for other countries.
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Tracking nature dependencies and nature-related risks: integrated environmental-economic accounting in Australia — Crystal Bradley, Sarah Taylor, Michael Vardon et al. — SocArXiv — doi:10.31235/osf.io/mq6bv_v1
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.