The scope of the Ocean Economy, considered in the Portuguese Ocean Satelite Account (OSA), aggregates activities in two main areas: "established activities" and "emerging activities” which, in turn, are divided into groups. It considers nine groups, eight of which correspond to established activities (groups 1 to 8). The last group (group 9) includes new uses and resources of the ocean, which congregates emerging activities (see figure). The adopted criterion for the classification of economic activities as established or emerging obeyed the international logic of maturity level of the markets, namely what is followed in the EU, in the study “Blue Growth” for the purpose of international comparisons.
Overall, we adopted a value chain logic considering, inter alia, the level of industry disaggregation permitted by the National Statistical System. Given this restriction, the methodological option was to consider Maritime and Marine Equipment Services as independent groups, including cross-economic activities in other groups.
Mature statistical systems with quality and detailed data
Broad discussion with several stakeholders on the concepts, definitions, and aggregations of the account
Very good articulation among entities
Time consuming activity in the first exercise due to its pioneering character (pilot exercise)
Difficulty in obtaining information on emerging activities
Results compensate the effort: this organization of data allowed illustrating heterogeneity of the different groups (dynamic, productivity, resilience, etc.)
Understanding the impact of ocean activities on the national economy
Benefits generated to communities and livelihood improved
Community forestry in Nepal has brought a number of benefits including an increase in income. It has helped to fight against illegal logging by putting clear rules in place on timber access and a strong system of forest monitoring. Community livelihoods have also improved with easier access to firewood and fodder and better health care and energy access, for example through money from ecotourism and subsidies for renewable energy.
Community forestry shows traits of political, financial, and ecological sustainability, including emergence of a strong legal and regulatory framework, and robust civil society institutions and networks.
A continuing challenge is to ensure equitable distribution of benefits to women and marginalized groups.
The immediate livelihood benefits derived by rural households bolster strong collective action wherein local communities actively and sustainably manage forest resources. Community forests also became the source of diversified investment capital and raw material for new market-oriented livelihoods.
Conservation oriented community forestry is essentially a participatory process that requires strong technical assistance on both policy and implementation. Expanding the property rights of local communities over resources and empowering them with knowledge, information, resources, technologies, and required skills for forest management and institution building are basic building blocks for the community forestry. Gender and equity concerns are addressed from the program design so that the poor, women, and marginalized receive fair benefits from the program.
Legal rights over the resources, institutions, capacity, trust, and leadership,
It evolved from the community level, and is based on traditional uses of the forest by communities. This bottom-up approach is a great strength of the Nepalese model as it gives ownership and leadership to communities to decide both where to create a community forest and how to run it.
Benefits generated to communities and livelihood improved
Environmental Guide: Wildlife Friendly Roads
Ocelots roadkills in 2020, Costa Rica
VAVS
Presenting the Environmental Guide: Wildlife Friendly Roads at ICOET
VAVS
This guide is the tool used to collect wildlife data on roads to identify the impact and recommed measures for Costa Rica. It can be inpmenented on new road projects and for existing roads. Since 2015, this guide is used by Costa Rican Government to implement masures on new road projects. We started implementing it on exisitng roads since 2020.
1. Government participation;
2. Funding for the data collection;
3. Legislation requesting measures to reduce development impact on wildlife;
4. Inclusion on the Environmental Impact Assesment;
5. Funding for the implementation of measures to prevent or reduce road impact;
In many countries of Mesoamerican region, guidance is needed to reduce road impact. So this document can be adapted to local characteristics and to legislation of the country to start the implementaiton of measures on roads for wildlife;
Rather than harmonize data after it is collected, interagency standards for collecting underlying data for physical and monetary accounts will allow data to be aggregated and disaggregated, merged and filtered with ease. These standards should cover data storage and collection so that data collected over time are comparable. Further, sharing data across ministries and departments will prevent recollecting data when they exist.
Interagency cooperation
Statistical offices empowered to set standards
Data security and underlying support infrastructure
Fit-for-purpose data collection to answer particular policy questions may be redundant unless the full scope of existing data collection efforts are accessible and able to be disaggregated. Data to support ocean accounting may already exist, but are collected by environment ministries as well as by commerce and transport ministries.
Asset balance sheets log the stocks of assets and their values in the national accounts. Whereas flows of economic production--goods and services--have been used as primary indicators of the "health" of an economy, these measures do not take into account depreciation or degradation of the asset base form which these flows stem. Changes in the asset balance sheet would reflect, for example, the reduction in value of depleted fisheries stocks.
An asset balance sheet is useful for natural capital accounting and assessing the blue economy requires periodic assessments of asset stocks that are systematically collected and comparable. This would mean regular assessments of fishery stocks, undersea ocean and mineral deposits, and port infrastructure to name a few. Monetary accounts require prices for non-market natural capital assets.
While monetary accounts are the ideal, physical accounts (e.g. kg spawning stock biomass) can be useful where market prices do not exist.
Tracking changes in the asset balance sheet are more important than a comprehensive asset balance sheet compiled as a one-off exercise. These data must be collected with regularity to be useful for tracking the sustainability of the blue economy.
