December 2013: Participants at the High-level Meeting to Move Beyond Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Asia discussed the establishment of Systems of Environmental Economic Accounts (SEEA). Asian countries shared their experience using the SEEA framework to incorporate Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) and environmental information into their System of National Accounts (SNA) and green growth strategies.

The meeting is summarized in the latest issue of the Poverty-Environment Initiative (PEI) Newsletter from the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

The meeting, which took place from 8-10 October 2013, in Bangkok, Thailand, brought together over 80 policy practitioners and statisticians from Asian governments with experts on environmental and national income accounting to discuss approaches and methodologies beyond existing macroeconomic aggregates. Participants also discussed, inter alia: defining inclusive wealth to include natural capital; using ecosystem services valuation to inform policy and decision-making; and building capacity to conduct valuation exercises.

In a keynote address, Partha Dasgupta, University of Cambridge, expressed hope that the meeting will encourage countries to begin incorporating ranges for values of natural capital in national accounts instead of exact numbers, to reflect natural capital’s broader range of benefits, which he said cannot be captured as well using specific numbers.

Participants shared efforts to integrate environmental considerations into national accounts, and discussed ways to implement SEEA frameworks. Bangladesh, Bhutan and Laos have developed green growth strategies to account for natural capital in their national accounting systems, while India, Indonesia and the Philippines have used NCA methodologies.

UNEP, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics (SANDEE) organized the workshop, with sponsorship from PEI, Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES), Asian Development Bank (ADB), UN Statistics Division (UNSD) and the Economy and Environment Programme for Southeast Asia (EEPSEA). [PEI Press Release] [Meeting Website] [Video Presentations at Meeting] [Meeting Agenda] [PEI Newsletter, Issue 18]