Ecosystem services are the benefits that humans derive from Nature. In the last decades, research efforts have been made to better understand the connections between the natural sphere and the human sphere as well as to propose novel approaches to measure the value of ecosystem services. While economic valuation has so far been the most commonly used approach – expressing ecosystem services’ value in monetary units – recent efforts have focused on alternative qualitative or biophysical accounting approaches to express the value of ecosystem service in physical units.

The role of Ecological Footprint accounting as a biophysical approach for measuring the value of ecosystem services through a surface-equivalent unit is here investigated. This accounting tool allows keeping track of both the human demand on, and the Nature’s supply of, a precise sub-set of ecosystem services thus being able to make an ecological balance at the country level. A comparison between Ecological Footprint and economic valuation analyses is finally performed, for the forest ecosystem type, to highlight complementarities and correlations of these different approaches.

生态系统服务是人类从自然中获得的利益。在过去的几十年中，人们进行了许多研究工作，以更好地了解自然圈与人类圈之间的联系，并提出了新颖的方法来衡量生态系统服务的价值。尽管到目前为止，经济评估是最常用的方法-以货币单位表示生态系统服务的价值-但最近的工作集中在替代性的定性或生物物理核算方法上，以物理单位表示生态系统服务的价值。

本文研究了生态足迹核算作为通过地表等效单位衡量生态系统服务价值的生物物理方法的作用。这种会计工具可以跟踪人类对生态系统服务的精确子集的需求和自然的供给，从而能够在国家一级实现生态平衡。最后，针对森林生态系统类型，对生态足迹和经济价值分析进行了比较，以突出这些不同方法的互补性和相关性。