The national government intends to include the results of the Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) in the next Philippine Development Plan (PDP), the country’s economic blueprint.
National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) Director General and Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Arsenio M. Balisacan said the NCA, which is being conducted through the Philippine-Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES), is crucial to support the country’s future economic growth.
“The results of the environmental accounting being done by the Philippine-WAVES could help inform the next Philippine Development Plan, which we will start formulating by the third quarter of this year. In the new plan, we intend to retain the valuation of ecosystem services as a key strategy in the sustainable management of the environment and natural resources,” Balisacan said.
Balisacan added that there is a risk that high economic growth could stress the country’s natural resources without integrating environmental accounting in national and regional development plans.
The country’s NCA is being conducted through the World Bank-funded Global WAVES program.
The $1.5-million Philippine-WAVES project was launched in the country in April 2014. It aims to mainstream natural capital in development planning and in the economic accounts to support sustainable development.
“Through NCA, the worth of a service that we get from the natural environment will become known to us and, if this is taken into account directly in the estimation of national incomes, policymakers may now make better decisions about development priorities and investments, while promoting a more sustainable use of natural resources,” Balisacan said.
The Philippine-WAVES project, launched in April 2014, will pave the way for the crafting of a national account and associated indicators for mangroves, whose role in protecting coastal communities against storm surges and other
climate change-related events was highlighted after Supertyphoon Yolanda (international code name Haiyan).
The World Bank-supported project will focus on capacity building and generating data and indicators for key natural resources to support the Philippine government in institutionalizing the use of the selected System of Environmental and Economic Accounting (SEEA) modules.
The grant will also support the policy analysis of the data and indicators produced by the minerals and mangroves accounts. In addition, two ecosystem accounts for Southern Palawan and the Laguna Lake basin are also being developed by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and the Laguna Lake Development Authority.
Phil-WAVES will use the 2012 System of SEEA, an internationally accepted framework for the accounting of natural resources, to measure minerals and mangroves.
The Philippine Statistics Authority will use this information to develop macroeconomic indicators that will assess the value of these key natural resources and their contribution to the country’s gross domestic product.
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