Urban EEA Symposium

  

Urban Experimental Ecosystem Accounting Symposium
 A project that is looking into developing accounts of ecosystem services in urban areas and thus relates to one of the aims of the Norwegian government to develop indicators for Ecosystem services (St.meld. 14 (2015-2016) Nature for livet). The project is looking into using the SEEA system. What exactly the SEEA system is I actually had to look up, to my excuse I did not attend the first day of the symposium which was about technical issues. The SEEA “contains internationally agreed on standard concepts, accounting rules and tables for producing internationally comparable statistics on the environment and its relationship with the economy” (UN). Basically, it is a system in which different methods, to account for an ecosystem and their services, are put through the SEEA framework and then give an outcome that is comparable. Interesting enough the system is supposed to account for not only one ecosystem service in an ecosystem, but it accounts for several services. Simply said: The accounting happens through putting a grid over an ecosystem unit and each cell can then accounts for the major service in its cell and hence several services can be accounted for within the ecosystem.NINA and SSB is working on several projects to account for ecosystem services and I feel lucky to have the opportunity to follow those projects.