Ecosystem accounts and material footprints

ended

The project aims to develop two of the priority areas in the call, namely priority 2.3 Ecosystem accounts and 2.5 Material footprints. The aim of the project related to priority 2.3 Ecosystem accounts is to create pilot ecosystem condition accounts for Norway based on and supplementing the data and variables available in these previous reporting frameworks, identifying and documenting incompatibilities, and thus providing useful lessons for both the Norwegian nature monitoring and reporting frameworks, as well as the proposed EU-level implementation of SEEA EA ecosystem condition accounting. The work will be divided into two parts, one for mandatory variables as suggested in the proposed EU-regulation on ecosystem accounts, and one for voluntary indicators. The first part of the project will follow the testing of the guidance note on ecosystem condition accounts arranged by Eurostat. The aim of the project related to priority 2.5 Material footprints is to expand Material Flow Accounts (MFA) for Norway to also cover domestic processed output, balancing items and raw material equivalents. This will harmonise domestic MFA with requirements set by the EU Circular Economy Action Plan and enable a more comprehensive view of economy-wide resource usage. Rewriting current routines from SAS to a set of Python objects can enhance efficiency and shareability with other NSIs. Additionally, the project will aim to scope whether MFA-data on energy-products could be used to improve the quality of national account fixed-price figures for energy-products. The project is divided between four work packages, answering to two of the priority areas in the call, namely 2.3 Ecosystem accounts (WP2 and WP3) and 2.5 Material footprints (WP4). The description of the project is therefore divided accordingly throughout the application form. WP1 is set up for administrative purposes covering the entire project.