Developing physical environmental accounts

Description

Developing physical environmental accounts involves systematically measuring, recording, and reporting data on natural resources and environmental impacts. This strategy enables governments and organizations to track resource use, waste generation, and ecosystem changes, providing a factual basis for informed policy and management decisions. By integrating environmental data with economic accounts, it remedies the problem of undervaluing natural assets, supports sustainable development planning, and helps monitor progress toward environmental targets and regulatory compliance.

Implementation

This strategy features in the framework of Agenda 21 as formulated at UNCED (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), now coordinated by the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development and implemented through national and local authorities.

Agenda 21 recommends that national governments should consider implementing the necessary enhancement in data collection to set in place national IEEAs with a view to contributing pragmatically to sound economic management. Major efforts should be made to augment the capacity to collect and analyse environmental data and information and to integrate it with economic data, including gender desegregated data. Efforts should also be made to develop physical environmental accounts. International donor agencies should consider financing the development of intersectoral data banks to help ensure that national planning for sustainable development is based on precise, reliable and effective information and is suited to national conditions.