The nation’s economic accounts provide objective, regular, and standardized information routinely relied upon by public and private decision makers. But they are incomplete. The U.S. and many other nations currently do not account for the natural capital — such as the forests, grasslands, wildlife, soils, and water bodies— upon which all other economic activity rests. It is time to create formal natural capital accounts (NCAs) for the United States. NCAs would standardize, regularly repeat, and aggregate diverse natural resource and environmental data and allow that data to be linked to economic activity already captured by GDP, jobs reports, and other national tracking data. NCAs would help guide and potentially save billions of investment dollars every year by helping businesses and governments understand the past, peer into the future, innovate, and plan for shocks.
Results/Conclusions
This poster, from the SESYNC/Powell Center Working Group on Natural Capital Accounts, will highlight the progress made so far in creating NCAs in the U.S. for land, water, and ecosystems; discuss pilot ecosystem accounts for the Southeast region of the U.S.; and examine policy applications and opportunities of NCA. Further, it will explain why it is important and timely to develop NCAs for the U.S.; discuss current technical and cultural challenges in developing and using NCAs; and identify ways that scientists, managers, and decision-makers can contribute to advancing the development and use of NCAs.