Comment:

Environmental and aesthetic quality is a cultural service intended to capture the hedonic value that may be reflected by increased property prices of good environmental and aesthetic quality. The potential services is calculated as the mean of five indices of aesthetic quality for non built land uses only (i.e. not urban or roads): the presence of wetlands, conservation priority, steep slopes, low human footprint and lack of cropland. Realised environmental quality is then the product of potential environmental quality and accessibility. Accessibility is defined using the agglomeration index of Uchida and Nelson (2009). Areas that maintain high environmental quality whilst still being accessible to populations have a high RREAQ index. Areas more than 2 hours from a population centre of 50K people have RREAQ set to zero because of the accessibility constraint.