10 September 2014: The Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES) program has released the September 2014 edition of its newsletter, featuring recent developments in natural capital accounting (NCA) in Botswana, Mauritius and the Climate Investment Funds’ (CIF) Forest Investment Programs (FIP), as well as upcoming events, recent publications, and news stories about NCA and WAVES partner projects.

According to the newsletter, Botswana, one of WAVES’ eight core implementing countries, has created a Natural Capital Accounting unit in the Macroeconomics Policy Division of the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning. The unit is tasked with coordinating cross-sectoral NCA objectives in the country and ensuring that they are incorporated into Botswana’s 11th National Development Plan, which will commence in 2016.

The newsletter contains an interview with the FIP Senior Program Coordinator, Andrea Kutter, on the relevance of forest accounting to REDD+, which FIP funds as a targeted program under the CIF Strategic Climate Fund (SCF). The interview follows a WAVES workshop on forest accounting where seven of the eight FIP countries discussed mainstreaming forest accounting into development policy. Work is going forward in two of those countries, Mexico and Ghana, to explore forest accounting at the national level.

The newsletter also discusses experimental ecosystem accounts conducted by the Government of Mauritius and Indian Ocean Commission (IOC) that aggregate biodiversity, water and other environmental data on Mauritius to assess policies for sustainable development and climate change adaptation in small island developing States (SIDS). The newsletter reports that the study, which appears in a June 2014 report by the IOC, has been well-received by the Government of Mauritius and broader policy community, including at the UN Conference on SIDS held in Samoa in September 2014.

Other items covered in the newsletter include: an editorial by Mahmoud Mohieldin, Corporate Secretary and the President’s special envoy at the World Bank, on the relevance of NCA to the post-2015 development agenda; the publication of the ‘Handbook on the Economics of Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity;’ and recent discussions about NCA in the popular media. [WAVES Newsletter] [IISD RS Coverage of SIDS Conference]