Official statistics for decision making: an environmental accounting case study related to biodiversity

Decision-makers’ increasing awareness of biological resources’ importance for humanity’s economic and social development has driven the inclusion of biodiversity among the main topics dealt with by official statistics, thus enabling an extension of traditional analyses based on social and economic data to cover crucial environmental and sustainability aspects. Within official statistics, environmental-economic accounts can play a specific role in supporting initiatives stemming from the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Together with core national accounts, environmental accounting is involved even directly in the implementation of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets (ABTs) agreed upon in the context of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020: according to ABT2, biodiversity values are to be incorporated into reporting systems and into national accounting as appropriate. In particular, data for monitoring the mobilization of financial resources for the implementation of this Strategic Plan as well as for assessing resource needs are of interest according to ABT20. For these purposes, data derived from official statistics’ environmental accounting on actual expenditure for biodiversity protection have special merits, due to their high quality and to the fact that they are linked to core national accounts data and hence particularly suitable for use in modelling. On the other hand, while policies can easily be developed by committing financial flows to given purposes, monitoring the same policies based on information on actual utilization of money may not be that easy from politicians’ viewpoint. The use of data on funding vs data on actual expenditure may be an issue.