Many countries, including Australia, are at last realising the need for the environment and nature to take centre stage.
New research shows that an increasing number of countries are publishing ecosystem accounts, helping to embed nature in economic and financial decisions.
Internationally endorsed guidelines for ecosystem accounting were released by the United Nations in 2014 and provide a multidisciplinary framework that allows ecological and socio-economic data, including indicators such as GDP, to be combined. This framework underpins compiling a rich and coherent evidence base on the relationship between nature, and economic and social activity.
“While progress in countries with advanced measurement systems such as Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom might be considered unsurprising, it is exciting and intriguing to see the developments underway in countries such as Guatemala, the Philippines and Rwanda,” said University of Melbourne Fellow and co-author, Carl Obst.
“The range of policy applications for ecosystem accounting, from peatland management to reporting on Sustainable Development Goals, is also promising. These policy applications are a significant advance on having application specific data sets that, while useful in their own right, do not collectively convey a common environmental history.”
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