In the past few weeks, many in the natural capital community have been travelling far and wide to various UN meetings and COPs. Often, our Director, Carl Obst, is also trotting the globe, spreading the word about natural capital accounting – many of our international readers will have met Carl at various conferences, lectures and meetings.
But over the past few weeks, he has stayed a little closer to home, continuing the important work of advancing natural capital accounting in Australia.
Over the past three weeks, Carl has:
- presented at the ESCoE/UNSW conference on economic measurement in Sydney (25&26 November)
- participated in a DCCEEW SEEA Ecosystem Accounting Technical Advisory Panel meeting in Canberra (29 November)
- lectured as part of the ANU/ABS SEEA course in Canberra (3 December).
Connecting economics and the environment
The conference in Sydney was an opportunity to engage with world leading experts in the measurement of productivity, prices, index numbers and capital. While often highly theoretical in focus, that expert community is increasingly interested in making the connection to the environment and natural capital. Carl’s presentation concerned a joint paper with Eli Fenichel from Yale University and Scott Wentland from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis on aligning concepts of economic value, index number theory, the measurement of sustainability and the role of national accounting. The paper is currently under review and will be published in 2025. It might be dry but it’s exciting stuff for interested people.
Advising the Australian Government
Carl is one of eight people on the Technical Advisory Panel that the Australian Government established in early 2024 to guide the development and implementation of System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA) Ecosystem Accounting in Australia. The meeting in Canberra at the end of November was the first face to face meeting of the group and it was an excellent chance to engage at length on the potential of ecosystem accounting and the key challenges that the government needs to consider. We can expect a release of national ecosystem accounts in early 2025, with an ongoing program of development and extension expected beyond that release. The ABS also recently released an information paper on ecosystem accounting that gives a good overview of the current plans and state of play.
Developing the next generation of natural capital accountants
The Australian National University (ANU) has been running a course about the SEEA in partnership with the Australian Bureau of Statistics since 2012. Over that time, more than 200 people have completed the 5 days of lectures and exercises, including a field trip to learn about how to measure ecosystem condition. As one of a cohort of Australian experts in SEEA who present the course content, Carl provides an introduction to the System of National Accounts (SNA) – the UN standard for measuring economic activity – and gives an overview of ecosystem accounting. This course is making a substantial contribution to developing the next generation of natural capital accountants to meet the global demand for this growing field.