The United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), in collaboration with the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), has published an interoperability strategy for the next generation of the System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA). The document paves the way toward implementing and scaling up the semantic web vision while taking open science to the next level.
The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) Ecosystem Accounting (EA) requires the integration of streams of substantial and diverse data. These include geospatial and other data sources, which have proven challenging for some national statistical offices (NSOs) to implement. Although a variety of ecosystem service modelling platforms have been built over the last 15 years to meet various user demands, their development has been uncoordinated. These platforms often duplicate efforts, rely on data that are siloed and rarely effectively reuse the knowledge gained from past modelling efforts.
By making the data and models that underlie SEEA interoperable (able to work together with minimal effort), NSOs and the scientific community can advance sustainability science and practice by making it possible to rapidly integrate and share new scientific data and models. Doing so requires an understanding of the benefits of interoperability, the costs of the status quo and concrete pathways toward community-endorsed approaches for interoperability. The Artificial Intelligence for Environment & Sustainability (ARIES) Network, which powers the ARIES for SEEA Explorer, offers such a path toward interoperability and the benefits it offers to NSOs and scientific and policy communities.