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Natural Capital Accounting as a Monitoring Tool for Decision Making
Citation:
Russell, M. Natural Capital Accounting as a Monitoring Tool for Decision Making. ACES, NA, DC, December 12 - 15, 2022. https://doi.org/10.23645/epacomptox.21663515
Impact/Purpose:
Present at ACES on natural capital accounting and its use for monitoring impacts of decisions
Description:
Natural Capital Accounting is the systematic tracking of ecosystem asset’s extent, condition, capacity, and production and use of their beneficial services through time. In most cases the goal is to generate national scale accounts on an annual basis so that people can be aware of nature’s wealth and these accounts can be compared to other national economic indicators and accounts. To facilitate those comparisons, natural capital accounts follow statistical standards and recognized accounting frameworks such as that presented by the recently accepted UN’s System of Environmental-Economic Accounting – Ecosystem Accounts (SEEA-EA). The framework and standardization of accounting offer decision makers a valuable tool for monitoring impacts of their decisions. Natural capital accounts are designed to track changes in ecosystem extent, condition, capacity, supply and use, as well as the potential translation of disparate units into a common “currency”. Each one of these accounting tables offers the user useful information on the status and trends of ecosystems of interest. What is actually tracked in accounts is flexible, allowing users to track things as simple as the area of wetlands in a region, for example, or as complex as the amount of wild rice harvested from a specific lake by a specific group. As well as tracking measures of ecosystem condition that might be proxies for supply and use of ecosystem goods and services, accounts can also track the capacity of ecosystems to continue to produce those goods or services into the future, thus giving decision makers a way to track the underlying drivers of things directly beneficial to stakeholders but also assess changes in their sustainability. The United States will soon embarked on the regular development of national scale natural capital accounts, but many federal agencies already regularly generate or use national datasets such as national surveys, monitoring efforts and remotely sensed data, which can be used for accounting purposes. Pilot accounts for the US, at national and regional scales, and for urban areas, have been completed as research level products by multiple federal agencies and academic partners. Here we present background on SEEA-EA with highlights from existing work on US ecosystem service accounts as a demonstration of their potential to be useful to decision makers. As the US moves towards the regular production of national scale environmental-economic accounts, local and regional decision makers might be well served to use similar accounting approaches for monitoring status changes in ecosystems due to specific interventions.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: Natural Capital Accounting as a Monitoring Tool for Decision Making
PRESENTATION.PDF (PDF, NA pp, 2062.675 KB, about PDF)