The White House is launching plans to formally stitch the value of nature into national economic statistics, Ben writes.
Why it matters: It could eventually influence federal decision-making and policy on climate and energy across many agencies.
But full implementation — if it survives future administrations — is far off, and it’s initially focused on R&D and pilot programs.
Driving the news: This morning the White House released a “National Strategy to Develop Statistics for Environmental-Economic Decisions.”
- It’s an effort to remedy what officials call a longstanding problem — “natural capital” doesn’t show up in traditional economic data like GDP.
- They don’t capture the “role and value of underlying natural assets, such as land, water, minerals, animals, and plants,” a summary notes.
The big picture: The economy is tethered to natural capital in many ways — think the food chain, raw materials for drugs, travel and tourism, health and much more, it states.
On climate, natural capital accounting “can provide important early-warning mechanisms associated with physical and transition risk.”
What’s next: A lot of work and test-driving. The first pilot efforts begin this year but full implementation is not envisioned until 2036.