The Government of Rwanda’s strategic development plans emphasize the importance of environment protection, natural resource management and climate change preparedness. Natural Capital Accounts (NCA) are an important tool for tracking progress on socio-economic, environment and natural resource indicators. Natural Capital Accounting brings together information on how natural resources are contributing to the economy – information on resource stocks and flows, uses and users, scarcities and potentials – to improve development decisions. By design, NCA is linked to the System of National Accounts that helps to integrate natural resource use into economic development planning.
This process is guided by a Steering Committee led by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning (MINECOFIN), and its affiliated agency, National Institute of Statistics for Rwanda (NISR) together with the Ministry of Environment (MoE) and including members from the Ministry of Infrastructure, Ministry of Agriculture, Rwanda Development Board, and others.
Rwanda has developed Natural Capital Accounts for land, water, minerals and – with this document – ecosystems. The NCA approach helps to integrate natural resources into economic analysis and can provide a broader picture of development progress by providing consistent, reliable data to support economic assessments and sound policy formation. The ecosystem accounts build on the prior land and water accounts, using land cover analysis for the years 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2015 coupled with modelling of soil and water variables that describe landscape processes and ecosystem services.