ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES ACCOUNTING

Putting economics into environmental conservation is a challenge that environmental accounting confronts head on. The Environment and Natural Resource Accounting (ENRA) II Project adopted this task for the Cordillera region. It took the responsibility of translating into quantifiable terms the value of Cordillera’s rich biodiversity and thriving indigenous culture.
- Terence D. Jones, UNDP

It is now been 16 years since the historic Earth Summit (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development) took place in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Out of this Summit emerged Agenda 21 - a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment. The response of the UN Statistics Division to this Agenda was the Handbook of National Accounting entitled Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting. This Handbook and the UN System of integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting (SEEA) being issued as an interim resulted to pilot-testing in various countries that included the Philippines.

The Cordillera Administrative Region was fortunate to have been chosen in 1998 as the pilot-testing area of the Philippines in its ENRA II Project. The articles [WRA, CAR] [WRA, Agno] here are based on the outputs of said Project. The tables [WRA, CAR] [WRA, Agno] are taken entirely from the resulting publications.

The current primary environmental endeavor of PURSUES are activities related to the localization of environmental accounting. The need to make ENRA relevant to local government units is imperative considering the scarcity of local resources available to these even as 16 years elapsed since the enactment of the New Local Government Code (1992). PURSUES hopes to make a dent in local/rural development by pursuing localized environmental accounting.