CTCN/ Ocean Accounts webinar: Introduction on Ocean Accounting - managing our impacts on the ocean

Integrating information on the ocean has been a challenge, because it has been fragmented across disciplines, agencies and ideologies. The Ocean Accounts Framework is based on existing statistical standards, the System of National Accounts (SNA), used to measure national economies and the System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA) used to measure environment-economy linkages. This presents a coherent measurement framework that links economics, ecology and sociology. Many of the information requirements and analytical objectives of the Ocean Accounts Framework are consistent with those of climate change and disaster risk analysis.

Participants will learn about the basic principles of environmental-economic accounting and how they have been applied to integrating data on the ocean. The benefit will be linking to a new community of practice on ocean accounting.

The framework is described in the Technical Guidance for Ocean Accounting, available on ESCAP’s Regional Ocean Accounts Platform. Further development of the framework and pilots will be undertaken by the Global Ocean Accounts Partnership, a collaboration of ESCAP with the University of New South Wales and several institutional partners. Interested countries and institutions are welcome to join the partnership, request advice on pilots and comment on the documentation.The Ocean Accounts Framework began piloting in several countries in mid-2019 and results of those pilots were reported at the First Global Dialogue on Ocean Accounting in Sydney, Australia in November 2019. Related projects have been conducted, such as scoping of a global ocean ecosystem map, an inventory of global datasets and scoping of data and models linking sea temperature and fish stock.

Presenters:

• Michael Bordt is Senior Economic Advisor on Ocean Accounts with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. He retired from a long career as environmental statistician Statistics Canada and served at ESCAP as Regional Advisor on Environment Statistics from 2016 to 2019. His team at ESCAP was the main motivator of a new approach to integrating data and statistics on the ocean.
• Teerapong Praphotjanaporn joined ESCAP Statistics Division in 2011. He has led and coordinated a wide range of ESCAP statistical capacity development programmes such as environment, disaster, gender and health statistics. He is an Asia-Pacific focal point for the partnership on mainstreaming the System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA) and a part of the ESCAP team that pioneered a statistical approach to ocean data and statistics.
• Lyutong CAI is the technical assistant on Ocean Accounts with ESCAP Statistics Division. With the background of physical oceanography, she provided technical assistance for the pilot projects in China, Malaysia, Samoa, Thailand and Viet Nam. By developing the comprehensive global ocean data inventory, she contributes to broadening the availability of ocean statistics on the scientific ocean data.

Please find more information and relevant materials about ESCAP Ocean Accounts Platform here.