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Introduction to Natural Capital Accounting for the US
Citation:
Posner, S., F. Soulard, K. Bagstad, K. Warnell, C. Rhodes, AND M. Russell. Introduction to Natural Capital Accounting for the US. A Community on Ecosystem Services (ACES) Conference, Washington, DC, December 03 - 07, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
One barrier to the creation of NCAs and ecosystem accounts has been the need for extensive collaboration between a trio of disciplines—natural sciences, economics, and accounting—that see the world in different ways. Another long-standing hurdle has been a lack of strong coordination between the government and the private sector, which must collaborate on data collection and setting accounting standards, both complicated tasks. This session will describe current work to develop a systematic, coordinated system that delivers regular information on the status, economic uses, and financial implications of our nation’s natural and environmental resources.
Description:
The nation’s economic accounts provide objective, regular, and standardized information routinely relied upon by public and private decision makers. But they are incomplete. The U.S. and many other nations currently do not account for the natural capital — such as the forests, grasslands, wildlife, soils, and water bodies— upon which all other economic activity rests. It is time to create formal natural capital accounts (NCAs) for the United States. NCAs would standardize, regularly repeat, and aggregate diverse natural resource and environmental data, allowing those data to be linked to economic activity already captured by GDP, jobs reports, and other data that track national performance. NCAs would help guide and potentially save billions of investment dollars every year by helping businesses and governments understand the past, peer into the future, innovate, and plan for shocks. This session will introduce participants to NCAs currently in use in several countries around the world and explore the approach of an inter-agency working group that is piloting NCAs for the U.S. Presentations will highlight the progress made so far in creating NCAs in the U.S. for land, water, and ecosystems; discuss pilot ecosystem accounts for the Southeast region of the U.S.; and examine policy applications and opportunities of NCA. Our goals for the session are that participants will: - Understand why it is important and timely to develop NCAs for the U.S. - Learn about the inter-agency working group that is creating NCAs for the U.S. - Understand current technical and cultural challenges in developing and using NCAs - Identify ways that scientists, managers, and decision-makers can contribute to advancing the development and use of NCAs - Understand how other countries are employing NCA