Establishing a baseline
One of the best things about a set of natural capital accounts is that it establishes a baseline for future measurements of nature and biodiversity.
If our goal – as a society – is to restore nature, we need to understand what we’re working with. We need the full picture of nature, where is it, how is it changing and what is driving that change. We also need to recognise that nature is different in each geographic area.
At the moment, governments, businesses and organisations measure nature using a piecemeal approach. There are hundreds of well-intentioned projects, and a range of incredibly useful data sets. But it’s almost like a death by 1,000 cuts. Each data set reports the same bad news: we are losing our nature and biodiversity at an incredible rate.
What’s missing is a system that ties all the data together – one, standard way of measuring nature and biodiversity that we can return to, again and again. One that is shared and that we all contribute too. One common language.
The approach to creating that data set is natural capital accounting.
What’s the solution?
Using the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), we can evolve beyond the piecemeal approach. We can set a baseline for where Australia’s nature and biodiversity is right now, and then we can measure it accurately at regular intervals in the future. Importantly, we will use the same language as we do this
This will help us as we aim for the important targets we need to meet to prevent catastrophic climate change, including the 30×30 biodiversity targets. And without this baseline set of data how can we expect a nature market to operate when we don’t know how much exists, where it exists and who can trade it! If we use natural capital accounting, we can accurately define what a 30*30 target looks like and where it is.
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