Transcript system_environmental_accounting

System of EnvironmentalEconomic Accounts
International Seminar on the Implementation of the 2008 SNA in
Asia and the Pacific Region and Its Challenges
Seoul, Republic of Korea
18-19 September 2012
Daniel Clarke
United Nations, ESCAP
Background
• The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) –
Central Framework, was adopted as an international standard
by the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC) at its
forty-third session in 2012.
• It is the first international statistical standard for
environmental-economic accounting.
• The SEEA brings statistics on the environment and its
relationship to the economy into the core of official statistics.
What is SEEA?
• Organising framework for information on
– Interactions between environment and economy
– Stocks and changes in the stocks of environmental
assets
• Uses an accounting approach to be both
comprehensive and internally consistent
• Structures information in monetary and
physical terms
• Multi-disciplinary framework
– Economists meet Scientists meet Statisticians
SNA and SEEA
• Together, provide representation of both economy
and environment as stocks and flows
• SEEA was designed to be coherent and
complementary with other international standards,
recommendations and classifications particularly the
System of National Accounts 2008, and also:
– the Balance of Payments and International Investment
Position (BPM6),
– the International Standard Industrial Classification of All
Economic Activities (ISIC), and
– the Central Product Classification (CPC)
Rationale for EnvironmentalEconomic Accounts
• Incompleteness of current economic accounts
– Don’t incorporate many flows between economy
and the environment or flows in physical terms
– Do not account effectively for the cost of the use of
natural resources
– No clear or common definition of environmental
activity
• Link to information set for sustainable
development
• Belief in the power of accounting frameworks
Strength of an Accounting
Approach
• Accounting basis from the System of National
Accounts (SNA)
• Key strengths
– Broad coverage but also focus on specific components
– Integrated – clear links between production, consumption,
investment, profits, saving, financial transactions, natural
resources, wealth, productivity
– Consistent time series
– Measures concepts as distinct from reporting statistics
The information pyramid
Indicators
Accounts
(SEEA)
Basic Statistics
Economic | Environmental |Socio-demographic
Problem: Information Silos
Data often developed to
answer a particular
question or problem
Difficult to figure out if
all information is
included
Not always easy to see
the whole picture, or
how it relates to other
policy issues
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Solution: Integrated Information
• Help to make sense of
the larger picture
• Help to identify pieces
that are missing
• Help to verify reliability
of figures
• Help to make
connections between
statistical domains
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Role of SEEA
• A coherent systems-approach to compilation of
statistics from disparate sources
• Brings discipline to the organisation of
environmental, economic and related data
• Helps to verify reliability of figures and identify
important data gaps in the statistical system
• Produces aggregate indicators that provide an
overview of performance and sustainability in terms
of the stocks and flows of the system
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Evolution of SEEA
• SEEA 1993
– 1st Rio Conference (UN Conference on Sustainable Development) in
1992 recognized the need for more integrated environmentaleconomic information for policy
– Called on UN Statistics Division to develop the system and called on all
member states to implement
• SEEA 2003
– Updated manual showing emerging best practices and theory
• SEEA 2012
– First international standard for environmental-economic accounting
– Concerns raised at Rio +20 of limitations of GDP and other accounting
aggregates for assessing economic performance and well-being and
reinforced importance of implementing decisions of previous UNCSD
conferences
The SEEA standard
2012 SEEA – The Central Framework (standard)
Chapter 1 – Introduction
Chapter 2 – Accounting structure
Chapter 3 – Physical supply and use
Chapter 4 – Monetary transactions
Chapter 5 – Asset accounts
Chapter 6 – Sequence of accounts, aggregates and
indicators
2013 SEEA – Experimental Ecosystem Accounts (state of the art)
2013 SEEA – Applications and Policy Uses (state of the art)
Subsystems:
SEEA-Water, SEEA-Energy, SEEA-Material flows (MFA), SEEAAgriculture
SEEA Central Framework
The international standard for environmental accounting, includes:
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Physical flow accounts:
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Monetary accounts:
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systematic physical description of physical flow including the exraction of natural resources their use
and transformation within the economy and the return to the environment.
Water, energy, material flow, air and water emission accounts.
identify environmentally-related transactions presented in the existing SNA flow accounts in order to
make them more explicit for analysis
Environmental taxes and subsidies, environmental goods and services, environmental protection
expenditures and resource management expenditures
Asset accounts:
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Stocks and changes in stocks (flows) of natural resources such as land, forest, water, fish, soil and
mineral and energy resources in physical and monetary terms.
Wealth accounts and calculation of depletion.
Environmental Activity Accounts:
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SEEA provides internationally-agreed definitions and high-level classifications for environmental
protection expenditure and resource management
Combining the accounts:
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combine modules of SEEA to form a full-sequence of accounts and integrating physical and
monetary accounts
Aggregates such as Green GDP, or Net Saving and productivity/efficiency indicators
SEEA Part II: Experimental
Ecosystem Accounts
• Scope set by concept of ecosystem services (welfare
benefits derived from ecosystem functioning)
• Adopts change in perspective:
– Ecosystem Accounts look at the environment as a collection of
ecological systems and focuses on their capacity to provide services to
humanity
• Objective is to provide the conceptual framework for
ecosystem accounts, including agreed concepts and
terminology
• Development of SEEA Part II is on-going, final version
expected by February, 2013
SEEA Part III: Extensions and
Applications
• Audience: Analysts and producers/compilers
• Technique based presentation
– Input-output and CGE modeling
– Resource efficiency and productivity indicators and the use of hybrid
tables
– Composite indicators
– Depletion adjusted saving techniques
– Consumption based I-O analysis / footprint techniques
– Decomposition analysis
SEEA sub-systems
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SEEA – Water (interim version finalised in 2007)
SEEA – Energy (under development)
SEEA – Fisheries
SEEA - Agriculture (in planning, FAO)
• Fully consistent with SEEA central framework
• Elaborate and expand guidance specifically
relevant to accounting for water/energy
• Intended audience includes specific resources
policy and management specialists
Basic Accounting Framework for SEEA
Territory of reference
Economy
Actors
-Enterprises
-Households
-Government
-Non-profit institutions
Activities
-Production
-Consumption
-Accumulation
Instruments
-Financial/Monetary
-Taxes/subsidies
-Financing
-Resource rent
-Permits
Analytical and Policy
Frameworks
Outside
territory of
reference
Land/
Resources/
Ecosystem
services
-Productivity analysis
-Natural resource management
-Climate change
-Green Growth/Green Economy
Emissions/
waste
Outside
territory of
reference
Environment
Envrironmental Assets (stocks)
-Land
-Water
-Ecosystems
-Soil
-Etc.
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DPSIR framework
Socioeconomic
Biophysical
Four quadrants of sustainability
I Improving access to services and
resources
 Current & capital costs associated
with services and their financing
 Losses in distribution
 Quantity of resource used
Sustainability
 Stocks of natural resources
 Emissions to water, air and soil and
waste generation
 Environmental protection expenditures
and resource management
 Land use and land cover
 Conditions and health of ecosystems
 Ecosystem regulatory services
 Economic instruments to reduce
impacts
III Improving the state of
environment and reducing impacts
Managing supply and demand II
 Resource efficiency
 Decoupling for emissions and resource
use
 Carbon and energy embedded in products
 Environmental goods and services
 Green jobs
 Environmentally-adjusted aggregates for
depletion
 Resource rent
 Investment in infrastructure
 Greenhouse gas emissions by economic
activity
 Expenditures on mitigation (e.g.
technologies)
 Expenditures on adaptation (e.g. dykes,
etc.)
Mitigating risks and adapting to IV
extreme events
Types of SEEA Physical Flow
Accounts
• Energy accounts
– Energy resources, products, residuals,
transformation, use
• Water accounts
– Abstraction, distribution, wastewater, reused
water, return flows
• Air emission accounts
• Solid waste accounts
– Generation of waste, collection, incineration, etc
• Emissions to water
SEEA Asset Accounts
• Present stocks and flows of individual
environmental assets in physical and
monetary terms
• Record changes due to growth, extraction,
natural and catastrophic loss, reappraisal,
revaluation
• Valuation using market price concepts
– General recommendation for use of Net Present
Value models using market based discount rates
(where actual market prices do not exist)
Depletion and Degradation
• Resource depletion: decrease in quantity of stock due to extraction
(catastrophic losses not part of depletion)
– Depletion is considered to be a cost against income and thus, in the sequence of
accounts, depletion may be used to produce adjusted (net) measures of valued added,
income and saving (in addition to consumption of fixed capital)
• Environmental degradation: changes in the capacity of the
environment (or to ecosystem functioning) that provides the full
range of potential ecosystem services (welfare benefits)
• Both depletion and degradation measures are important to
environmental sustainability measurement because economic
activity that creates depletion and degradation eventually cannot
be sustained. The measures can also be used to estimate indicators
of resource life and other indicators for long-term development
planning
Resource Rent
• Defined as the surplus value accruing to the
owner, extractor, or user of an environmental
asset after all costs and normal return have
been taken into account
• In practice, calculated as a residual (in relation
to normal returns on flows of resources into
the economy)
• Resource rent = scarcity rent, “unearned
income”
Environmental Activities
• Environmental Goods and Services Sector (EGSS) - “Green
economy”
– Environmental protection and resource management
activity
• Types of goods and services
– Characteristic and connected products
– Adapted goods – cleaner, environmentally friendly
• Economic indicators
– Production, employment, exports, investment
• Functional accounts
– Environmental protection expenditure accounts (EPEA)
SEEA Aggregates & Indicators
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Notion of “Green GDP”
Depletion/degradation to assets
Total physical flows by category (water, energy, etc.)
National expenditure on environmental protection
Total production/value added of environmental goods and
services sector (EGSS)
Structural statistics (e.g. water use by agriculture)
Land use/land cover trends
Environmental taxes/total taxes
“Pollutor pays” analysis
Energy supply by renewable resources
Productivity/intensity and decoupling
Implementation of SEEA
• Like other international statistical standards, it is expected
that SEEA will be implemented incrementally taking into
account national statistical office resources and requirements.
• To support this, the SEEA Central Framework accommodates a
flexible and modular approach to implementation within
national statistical systems which can be aligned with the
particular policy context, data availability and statistical
capacity of countries.
• At the same time, much benefit of the SEEA comes from the
ability to compare and aggregate across modules.
Data Sources
• In general, to produce minimum set of Central Framework
accounts, no specialized surveys or new data collections are
needed
• Important conventional data sources are:
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National accounts (e.g. production in physical and monetary terms)
Emissions inventories
Energy statistics
Trade statistics
Government statistics (e.g. apply SEEA classification to identify EPE)
• Additional data sources of relevance:
– Records and estimates from surveying of stocks of assets (mineral deposits,
forest cover, etc.)
– Scientific data from national authorities on hydrology, air quality, waste
management, etc.
Role of UN ESCAP
• At its 3rd Session in December, the ESCAP Committee
on Statistics will consider a paper on environment
statistics in the context of sustainable development
and green economy policies
• The paper will propose concrete actions of the ESCAP
secretariat in support of countries pursuing SEEA
implementation, including contributing to
development of training materials and supporting
opportunities for advocacy and sharing of
experiences between national statistical systems in
Asia and the Pacific
Some final thoughts
Implementation of the SEEA is:
• Closely linked to strengthening the statistical system,
development of the statistical infrastructure and collection
and compilation of basic statistics
• Undertaken in stages
• Flexible, each country may focus on different priority accounts
or themes in the gradual process towards comprehensive
accounting (e.g. first on asset accounting or on physical flow
accounting for energy and water)
• Coordination is key
Thank You!
Daniel Clarke: [email protected]
Acknowledgments:
Carl Obst, SEEA Editor
&
Alessandra Alfieri, Chief, Environmental-Economic
Accounting Section, UNSD