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.
Related Case Studies
This case study demonstrates the importance of different Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) accounts for development planning, based on experiences from Uganda and other countries.
This paper reports on the findings of the Southern Palawan Pilot Ecosystem Account in the Philippines, which follows a standardized system called the System of Environmental Economic Accounting – Experimental Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA-EEA) that ensures comparability, both nationally and internationally, and consistency with regularly produced economic statistics. Therefore, ecosystem accounts can be used to monitor trends in natural capital as well as the enforcement of resource management policies.
This paper Ecosystem-based Approaches to Adaptation in National Policy: The Cases of Nepal, Peru and Uganda provides an overview of international policy on ecosystem-based approaches to adaptation and presents the initial findings of research on the integration of such approaches into national policies and plans, including NAPAs
This paper reviews different approaches to making the economic case for improved management of natural capital in national planning and provides recommendations for governments to undertake economic analyses of the environment and natural resources management for planning purposes.