The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting - Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA) is a globally recognised framework that integrates ecological and economic data to support informed decision-making and policy development for sustainable ecosystem management. By measuring and tracking changes in natural capital assets (ecosystems and species) and ecosystem services flows, SEEA EA provides essential information to balance environmental conservation and economic development.

While most applications of ecosystem accounting have focused on terrestrial domains, its development in coastal-marine ecosystems remains limited. Moreover, while the SEEA EA is generally meant to be adopted at the national level, most ecosystem management decisions are made at the regional or local scale. Here, we apply the SEEA EA framework to a finer scale to investigate the supply of food provisioning ecosystem services in Sardinian coastal lagoons. 

Our results pinpoint that several difficulties remain in finding systematised data (e.g. structured and policy-relevant datasets). This, alongside a lack of data concerning key ecological aspects that could inform the condition tables, still hinder compilation of full accounts. Despite these limitations, we developed an initial informative set of accounts for the Sardinian lagoons, which includes variables that specifically assess the condition of these ecosystems, including variables directly influenced by external stressors and climate (e.g. water temperature, chlorophyll-a concentration, proportion of non-native species, species biomass, water exchange capacity).

Our preliminary results are suggestive for a potentially fruitful applicability of the SEEA EA also at the regional/local scale. We therefore foster the use of SEEA EA to inform coastal lagoon management in contexts of climate change and increasing multiple stressor enhancement.

This work contributes to the ongoing development of Ocean Accounts with particular attention to transitional waters.