Our Director, Carl Obst, is off to Saudi Arabia this week for the first of a series of meetings aimed at supporting the national statistics office to build capacity in natural capital accounting.
Carl and the IDEEA Group team will be helping the General Statistics Authority of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (GASTAT) implement the United Nations System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) focusing on land, water, agriculture and energy.
This important project will improve the information base for the government of Saudi Arabia concerning the connection between the environment and the economic well-being and sustainability of the country.
Implementation of the SEEA requires input from a combination of skills sets including economics, statistics, national accounting, ecology, biophysical sciences and geospatial data management. It is also essential to work with local experts that have experience and knowledge to ensure the relevance of accounting outputs and build the institutional capacity to support long-term compilation of SEEA accounts.