Working group on SEEA Ecosystem Accounting Indicators
Overview
A clear understanding of the environment-economy nexus is critical for a wide range of today’s policy questions and global policy initiatives, including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, Paris Agreement and more, particularly with regard to informing synergies and trade-offs with regard to policy formulation. However, today’s policy questions require an understanding of the relationship between the environment and economy that goes beyond information on individual environmental assets. Increasingly, policy makers are defining sustainability in ways that also incorporate ecosystems and the services they provide to humanity.
Information from ecosystem accounts and related accounts can be organized and integrated to provide policy-relevant indicators and aggregates and contribute to global monitoring framework and a range of other indicator frameworks and applications.
The Working Group on SEEA Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA) Indicators was established in September to support the identification of a list of indicators derived from the SEEA EA and its mainstreaming for the global indicator monitoring framework including the Post 2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. It supports the SEEA EEA revision process and in particular the drafting of Chapter 14 of the revised SEEA EA. For more information on the Working Group, please see its terms of reference.
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In June 2023, during its 18th Meeting, the UN Committee of Experts on Environmental-Economic Accounting (UNCEEA) endorsed the disbanding of the Working Group on SEEA EA Indicators and the Subgroup on Accounting for Biodiversity that were established to support the revision process in 2020, while highlighting the importance of the work on the biodiversity indicators and their metadata, which will be taken up by the whole Technical Committee and possibly ad hoc task teams that may be established to address specific indicators. |