2nd Policy Forum on Natural Capital Accounting for Better Decision Making: Applications for Sustainable Development, Part 2

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May 2018
Source: 
Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES)
This is part two of the publication resulting from the Second Policy Forum on Natural Capital Accounting for Better Decision Making, which was co-hosted by the World Bank, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands (MFA), and United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) in 2017. It compiles seven case studies of natural capital accounting (NCA) in policy-making: two each on Australia and the Pacific, as well as one each for New Zealand, Peru, and Uganda. These case studies illustrate several different applications of NCA for decision-making and reporting, including, for instance:
  • In Uganda, NCA was used to compile spatial evidence for reporting on progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially SDG 15 (Life on Land). It also highlighting the benefits of biodiversity by linking the accounts to spatial statistics on the economy (e.g. tourism expenditure and non-timber forest product yields).
  • In New Zealand, environmental accounts provided a framework for organizing data used to analyze the impact of a carbon tax. 
  • In Australia’s Central Highlands, results demonstrated that a transition away from native forest harvesting would improve the condition of ecosystem assets, the conservation of biodiversity, and the provision of ecosystem services for other land uses. It also found that economic gains from increased water supply and carbon storage exceeded the losses from ceasing native timber production. 
The report also includes lessons for practitioners on utilizing NCA in their decision making. These include, for instance, considerations on the scale of the analysis (e.g. site or landscape), definition of dynamic functions to enable time series accounts (e.g. carbon accumulation, decomposition), and challenges of combining data sources with different boundaries or difficult to define boundaries.
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Country: 
Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Uganda
Themes: 
Indicators and Measurement, Natural Capital
Key search terms: 
ecosystem services, SEEA, natural capital accounting, natural capital valuation, economic valuation of natural capital

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