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Introduction to Natural Capital Accounting for the US (ACES 2018)
Citation:
Russell, M., C. Rhodes, AND F. Soulard. Introduction to Natural Capital Accounting for the US (ACES 2018). ACES, Washington, DC, December 03 - 06, 2018. https://doi.org/10.23645/epacomptox.22524799
Impact/Purpose:
Present an introduction to natural capital accounting at ACES 2018 and EPA's contribution to the national effort
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. National capital accounts (NCA’s) 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, job 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. Here we present an introduction to natural capital accounting using examples from successful implementation in Canada where they quantified changes in land cover (particularly conversion of forests to shrublands and agricultural land to urban land uses), the use and value of fisheries, and ecosystem service indicators for wetlands. The United Nations System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) includes a Central Framework for Environmental Accounts. The Central Framework looks at “individual environmental assets”, such as water resources, energy resources, etc. and how those assets “move” between the environment and the economy. The SEEA Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA-EEA) complements the SEEA Central Framework by taking the perspective of ecosystems and considers how individual environmental assets interact as part of natural processes within a given spatial area. These ecosystem assets provide ecosystem services, which are the beneficial contributions of ecosystems to economic and other human activity. The SEEA-EEA has a system of accounts that present a coherent and comprehensive view of ecosystems including ecosystem extent, condition, ecosystem services supply and use, and monetary value as well as standalone thematic accounts for land, carbon, biodiversity etc. that are important to track but may not be included in the other accounts. Ecosystem accounts following the SEEA-EEA have been compiled at both national and subnational scales to track linked environmental-economic trends in developing and developed-world contexts including Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Peru, the Philippines and Rwanda. In addition to our efforts to develop accounts for the US, substantial efforts are currently underway to construct ecosystem accounts for member nations of the European Union and for Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa through the U.N. Statistics Division.
URLs/Downloads:
DOI: Introduction to Natural Capital Accounting for the US (ACES 2018)
ACES 2018 RUSSELL INTRODUCTION TO NATURAL CAPITAL ACCOUNTING.PDF (PDF, NA pp, 802.665 KB, about PDF)