Our colleagues at IDEEA Global are part of a new project supporting Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Commission, on Ecosystem Accounting for EU member states.
Together with the Belgian VITO-led consortium, Ecounting (The Netherlands) and eftec (United Kingdom), IDEEA Global (Australia/Ireland) will support the production of ecosystem accounts in the European Union, having developed the official UN standard System of Environmental-Economic Accounting- Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA), applied here in Ireland in the pilot INCASE project.
Ecosystem accounting is a statistical framework for organising data, tracking changes in the extent and the condition of ecosystems, and linking the information to economic and other human activities to illustrate the benefits society receives from our natural systems and their services.
From 2021–2023, the consortium assisted the European Commission in developing of a set of methodological guidelines for how the official statistical standard can be used to produce annual ecosystem accounts at Member State level, as well as at EU level.
The consortium also developed a QGIS plug-in tool to facilitate this, and generate a new set of EU-wide ecosystem accounts in cooperation. The INCA platform can be found online HERE, covering:
Provisioning services: wood provision, crop provision, crop pollination
Regulating services: global climate regulation, local climate regulation, flood control, air filtration, soil retention
Recreation services: nature-based tourism
The next three years (2024-2026) will see IDEEA further assist Eurostat in preparing annual ecosystem accounts by the Member States.
Funded by the European Commission, the consortium will also develop the first Ecosystem Accounting statistical handbook for the EU and provide training and support to the EU Member States and beyond.
Read more HERE.