Ocean accounts are integrated records of regularly compiled and comparable data of ocean environment assets (e.g., extent/condition of mangroves), economic activity (e.g., sale of fish) and social conditions (e.g., coastal employment).
Ocean accounts organise social, economic and environmental information to enable coherent measurement of progress towards the sustainable development of the ocean, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals and other relevant national, regional and global commitments.
They retain a similar structure to existing national accounts maintained by National Statistical Offices or Finance Ministries and are compatible with the System of National Accounts, the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting, the Framework for Development of Environment Statistics and the ten Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics.
Ocean accounts integrate four key components:
- Macro-economic accounts from which economic measures such as GDP are derived, and from which legal, illegal, unreported, and unregulated activities can be accounted for.
- Environmental-economic accounts that explain assets and flows, wastes, expenditures, taxes, and subsidies.
- Ecosystem accounts which agree on a spatial framework or the extent, condition, biodiversity, services, and value of ecosystems.
- Structured data on ocean beneficiaries, technology, governance, and management.
Why are ocean accounts important?
Ocean accounts provide countries with the means to go Beyond GDP to measure and manage progress towards ocean sustainable development. They achieve this by:
- Enhancing the power of data by integrating multiple data sets from a range of sources to enable countries to monitor three critical trends:
- Changes in ocean wealth, including produced assets (e.g., ports) and non-produced assets (e.g., mangroves).
- Ocean-related income and welfare (e.g., income from fisheries for local communities).
- Ocean-based economic production (e.g., GDP from ocean-related sectors). - Creating a common information infrastructure (especially important because many ocean policy shortcomings arise from isolated information) to enable evidence-based decision-making on ocean governance matters including:
- Ocean policy development (e.g., Marine Spatial Planning) and the review of policy outcomes and their effectiveness.
- Assessing where (and where not) and how marine ecosystems perform better than conventional coastal infrastructure: e.g., when do mangroves or wetlands provide more benefits than concrete?​
- Activating private sector financing in the ocean economy and ecosystem restoration projects by providing investors with comparable and regularly updated project data to monitor progress, impact, and benefit.
- Understanding how growth and employment are underpinned by specific ecosystem conditions and functions: Invest $X to restore ocean to condition Y = Z benefits. - Supporting the derivation of comparable, Beyond GDP indicators. If a common accounting structure is used, these indicators can be integrated, and international comparisons made.
- Providing the information and indicators needed for international reporting on the SDGs, the Paris Agreement, and other relevant commitments.
- Organising and presenting information in manner that decision-makers can easily understand (e.g., as dashboards, scenarios, spatial plans, and indicators).
GOAP Secretariat