Making Nature Visible: What Can Natural Capital Accounting Do for Us?

Natural Capital Accounting (CCN) is a tool and information system for measuring changes in the stock and state of ecosystems, such as rivers and forests, and integrating the flow and value of ecosystem services into accounting and reporting systems. If integrated and used in decision-making, it can make the services provided by nature more visible in policy-making. Building on this recent work by the NESC, international and Irish policy, research and practice, this event will focus on the question ‘What can Natural Capital Accounting do for us?’.

Carl Obst, lead author of the United Nations System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) – the international standard for governments’ work on natural capital accounting – will discuss the current state of natural capital accounting around the world.

Iseult Sheehy, Executive Coordinator of Natural Capital Ireland, will moderate the session, and NESC Director Larry O’Connell will kick off the first session of the morning. Professor Jane Stout, an internationally renowned expert on pollination and one of Ireland’s leading spokespeople for natural capital, will explain “why we need to account for nature”.

During the event, there will also be additional contributions from representatives of the Central Bureau of Statistics, the National Parks and Wildlife Services of the United Kingdom, experts from the European INCASE project and the NESC itself; while the second session will explore recent research and policy developments in Ireland and provide an overview of what Ireland is currently doing at NCA.

Finally, the third session of the agenda will be used to learn about practical and research applications in the field of forestry (TCD), marine ecosystems (Marine Institute), nature finance (Irish Sustainable Finance Centre), Northern Ireland (Northern Ireland Environment Link) and some examples of how ECN is applied at the international level based on the work of the NESC.
 

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