Economy: Our thriving, sustainable economy conserves and grows our natural assets
Last updated: 25 June 2025
This outcome is about the transformative changes to our economy needed to play Scotland’s role in tackling the global climate and nature crises. It is also about the new opportunities that the transition to a net-zero, sustainable economy will create for Scotland, supporting our green economic recovery and boosting jobs, business and trade.
Here we report two indicators that help us to monitor progress towards this outcome: Scottish Natural Capital Accounts and Natural Capital Asset Index. These indicators reveal the important contributions that Scotland’s natural assets make to our economy, whilst highlighting the significant action and investment needed to conserve and grow Scotland’s stocks of natural capital.
Our natural capital in Scotland is rich and diverse, from our populations of wild species to soils, minerals and our iconic ecosystems like Caledonian pinewoods, blanket bogs, cold-water corals and sea lochs. This natural capital underpins our social, human and financial capital.
As illustrated in the Dasgupta Review of the economics of biodiversity, our economy is embedded in our natural environment, not separate to it. This means our economy is fundamentally dependent on our natural environment to supply the resources and services it needs and to assimilate its wastes, including greenhouse gases.
Measuring the many ways that our natural assets support the economy is challenging. As the Monitoring Framework is further developed, we will explore the options for additional indicators that will help to provide a meaningful and robust measure of progress towards this outcome. For example, we will consider indicators relating to investment in natural assets, jobs in the nature-based sector and wider green industries, the scale of green finance and other measures of Scotland’s progress in transitioning to a net zero, nature-positive economy.
Natural capital accounts
Indicator Updated: 25 June 2025
Headline: There was a small increase between 2016 and 2022 in the annual value of natural capital in Scotland (excluding fossil fuels).
Source: UK natural capital accounts 2024
Data for this chart can be downloaded from the data source page.
Note: data for renewable electricity provisioning is not available for 2021 and therefore the annual value for 2021 is lower than expected. All figures are given in 2023 prices.
This indicator reports the annual value in monetary terms of ecosystem services supplied by Scotland’s natural capital, excluding provisioning of fossil fuels. Find out more about the natural capital accounts indicator.
The UK Natural Capital Accounts (NCAs) produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) take a range of ecosystem services and aim to value, in monetary terms, the benefits they bring to society. The NCAs should be interpreted as a minimum value of the services provided by the natural environment as not all services can be monetised, such as pollination or flood protection.
Excluding fossil fuel provisioning, in 2022 the annual value was £5.9 billion, a slight increase from £5.6 billion in 2016, the first year for which data for all ecosystem services is available. Changes over time are largely explained by a decrease in recreation and tourism expenditure compared with 2016, and a gradual increase in the value of renewable electricity, timber and water provisioning.
Further information is available at Summary of Scottish Data from UK Natural Capital Accounts, 2024
Natural capital asset index
Indicator Updated: 25 June 2025
Headline: Overall, the capacity of Scotland’s terrestrial ecosystems to provide benefits to people has increased slightly since 2000, following decades of decline.
Source: Scotland’s Natural Capital Asset Index
Data for this chart can be downloaded from the data source page.
The Natural Capital Asset Index (NCAI) measures the potential of our natural assets (e.g. peatland, grassland, woodland) to provide benefits to society (through measurements of their quantity and quality) now and into the future. Find out more about the Natural Capital Asset Index indicator.
The Natural Capital Asset Index (NCAI) has increased slightly since detailed monitoring began in 2000. Whilst this broadly suggests that the potential of Scotland’s natural assets to provide ecosystem services has been maintained over the past 20 years, underlying trends of different habitats, trade-offs between services and individual indicators within the model tell a much more nuanced story. A back-casting exercise also suggests that natural capital in Scotland is at low levels when considering long term trends and declined significantly between 1950 and 1990.