9 March 2015: The Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES) partnership has convened a Regional Workshop in Turkey to promote natural capital accounting (NCA) in policy and development planning in the region. The workshop focused on methodologies for NCA, including case studies of water and forest accounting and the application of NCA to monitoring frameworks for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The World Bank Country Director for Turkey, Martin Raiser, opened the event, highlighting the need to maintain natural capital for sustainable economic growth and describing NCA as “a key tool to facilitate better decision-making, oriented towards greater economic resilience and a more efficient use of a country’s natural endowments.”

Speaking at the workshop the Turkish Statistic Institute’s Vice President, Mehmet Aktaş, identified the relevance of NCA to ongoing discussions about the development of SDGs as part of the post-2015 development agenda. In particular, he noted the potential to contribute a monitoring framework for the SDGs by integrating NCA into a System of Environmental Economic Accounts Central Framework (SEEA-CF), which the UN Statistics Commission recognized in 2013 as useful for informing policy frameworks for sustainable development, green growth and the green economy.

Over 50 experts attended the workshop, held from 9-11 March 2015 in Istanbul, Turkey, from the following countries: Albania, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The event was co-organized by WAVES in partnership with the TurkStat and the Turkish Ministry of Development, with cooperation from Statistics Netherlands, the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP). [World Bank Press Release] [Turkish Weekly News Story]