Ecosystem accounting for social-ecological policy: an applied ecological economics research agenda from Guatemala

Juan Pablo Castañeda , Daniel Pinillos

Economy and ecology are inseparable since economic decisions affect the natural systems that sustain them. Conventional economics still treats this dependence as an externality to be corrected through prices, even as ecosystems lose resilience and the economy presses against planetary boundaries. Ecological economics offers a more adequate framework, one that situates the economy within a finite biosphere and within limits set by biophysical criteria. This article synthesizes the foundations of the field and brings the Anglo-American and Latin American traditions together toward an applied ecological economics rooted in social metabolism, strong sustainability, and the critique of extractivism. It then systematizes the measurement instruments that make ecological dependence visible for policy, from valuation methods and multicriteria analysis to the ecological footprint, doughnut economics, and the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting. The argument is grounded in Guatemala, a megadiverse Mesoamerican country with a heavily extractive export structure and one of the longest national series of environmental-economic accounts (also called natural capital accounts) in Latin America. The Guatemalan accounts reveal a systematic depreciation of natural capital that conventional economic accounts, including their most well-known indicator (gross domestic product), fail to capture. Forest, water, soil, and wealth indicators all register losses that standard statistics fail to record, and they reshape what counts as economic growth once the depletion of the biophysical base is included. Building on this evidence, the article proposes an applied ecological economics research agenda. The agenda is organized into five interrelated work areas that connect ecosystem accounting, earth system science, and economics. Together they trace a concrete route from theory to public policy and territorial governance, toward transitions that are ecologically viable and socially fair, using Guatemala as a case study.