Some remarks on the `System of Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting' of the United Nations

Abstract

The publication of the `System of Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting (SEEA)' by the United Nations marked a decisive advance in the discussion of environmental accounting and will have a great influence on the design of national environmental accounting systems. SEEA contains a great variety of definitions, methods and procedures. Before this important system will be adopted on a broad basis, it may be useful to point out certain basic problems connected with it. In this article we will concentrate on two main problem areas. First, the fundamental incompatibility of economic and ecological spatial and time scales and, second, the questionable emphasis placed on data artificially generated with the help of hypotheses rather than on data based on empirical observations. The following discussion leads to the consequence that monetary valuations of environmental facts should be avoided. Because of the incompatibility of economic and ecological scales, the authors propose to renounce to a large extent full integration of these two aspects. Instead one should concentrate on the two following aims: development of a classification for a systematic description of the anthropogenic alterations of environmental factors and a compilation of a variety of coordinated indicators which, at widely differing aggregation levels and with a wide range of methods and scales, would help to observe changes in environmental quality over time within at least a rough framework.