MAINSTREAMING NATURAL CAPITAL AND ECOSYSTEM SERVICES INTO MANAGEMENT DECISIONS

Recent decades have witnessed drastic changes in people's perception of environment protection and sustainable development. The sphere of understanding of this issue has broadened to consciousness of advantages and losses from the natural capital, namely earth and water landscapes and their biodiversity. The importance of natural capital preservation for provision of steady flow of benefits from the ecosystem services is seen as vital for both wealthy and poor countries. Nowadays, the task is to integrate ecosystem services into practical solutions. This requires joint understanding of production of ecosystem services and of quantitative variety of benefits from them by various strata of society; understanding of the decision-making process by individuals, corporations, governments, the integration of scientific studies accompanied with institutional changes. The provision of rational nature management requires a mechanism of involvement of the natural capital and ecosystem services into the process of making managerial decisions on the basis of the monitoring system of ecoeconomic value of the natural capital. Interfaced development of the two scientific fields is crucial for environmental management economization. The first scientific field is perfection of economic assessment methods. The other one, equally representing an important part of the process, is the data collecting system on the use of natural capital reserves in all the spheres of natural management, including housekeeping. The UN statistics department proposed SEEA (System of Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting System) compatible with SNA (National Accounts System) in 1993. National Accounts classifies natural resources as tangible non-produced assets. Thus, EEAS is a product of new SNA, in which special attention is paid to the necessity of ecological sustainability assessment of economic growth. According to the analysis of the federal state statistical monitoring system in the sphere of natural resources recognition, the official statistics only contains information about the real volume of natural resources use and does not reflect their economic usage. The exploitation of natural resources in the household sector is not reflected in the statistical monitoring system. Improvement of the data collecting system in the sphere of natural resources exploitation is necessary for involvement of natural capital and ecosystem services in the process of making business and power. This process should be implemented in two directions: firstly, it is aggregation of data on physical and monetary flows within the natural resources sector in the statistical monitoring system; secondly, it is involvement into the statistical monitoring system of household activity in the sphere of natural resources exploitation. Restructuring of the statistical monitoring system and creation of the economic value monitoring system of natural capital, including the household sector, will make it possible to plan regional growth with regard to the population interests concerning creation of additional jobs and poverty level reduction. Besides, this will enable to involve natural capital into the process of making managerial decisions of power and business.