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Paper short abstract

This paper studies how AI-based tools to produce natural capital accounts 'value' non-human environments and processes.

Paper long abstract

In 2021, the UN has adopted the revised System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), aiming at the integration of natural capital and ecosystem services into official National Capital Accounts. To facilitate the implementation, several AI-based digital tools have been developed, developed by publicly funded research centers as well as private companies. Drawing on global data and models, they promise both government agecies and investors the rapid production and low-cost monitoring of natural capital accounts of landscapes even in data-scarce countries. But how do these tools ‘value’ natural entities and processes, and through which practices and based on which ‘values’ is natural capital in this case produced? Which contridictions arise between different valuation schemes present in this approach, i.e. ecological, climate-related or economic forms of valuation, and how are they addressed? Studying AI-based tools to value natural capital from a perspective of political ecology, STS and valution studies, I trace the production, dissemination and application of one of these tools in two different contextes, asking which logics and forms of valuation they are based on, how they relate to processes of assetization and financialization of non-human environment and which forms of governing landscapes and natural entities they bring forward.