The Ocean Accounts Framework adapts two international statistical standards—the System of National Accounts (SNA) and the System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA). The SNA provides a set of recommendations on how to compile monetary measures of economic activity, including a set of coherent, consistent and integrated macroeconomic accounts. It also provides and overview of economic processes, recording how production is distributed among consumers, businesses, governments, and foreign nations. The SEEA provides a framework that integrates physical environmental data with monetary data from the SNA to provide a more comprehensive and multipurpose view of interrelationships between the economy and the environment as well as the stocks and changes in stocks of environmental assets. The SEEA contains internationally agreed concepts, definitions, classifications, accounting rules, and tables for producing internationally comparable statistics and accounts, which are interoperable with the SNA.
The scope of the Ocean Accounts Framework is to support the compilation of spatially detailed national-level accounts covering maritime zones subject to sovereignty or national jurisdiction, namely internal waters, the territorial sea and contiguous zone, archipelagic waters, the exclusive economic zone, and/or the continental shelf. However, the framework is also applicable to the compilation of global accounts, recognizing some conceptual challenges in accounting for activities in areas beyond national jurisdiction. This document is divided into five main sections: (i) introduction to ocean accounts, (ii) structure of ocean accounts, (iii) process guidance for compilation of ocean accounts, (iv) use and maintenance of ocean accounts, and (v) a research agenda for ocean accounting that details the areas in which more work is required such as ecosystem services classification and new indicator development.