Guest Author: Dawa Zangpo
Bhutan’s step towards environment economic accounting
With over 60 percent forest cover and more than half of the country designated as Protected Areas (PAs), Bhutan has a strong incentive to conduct Natural Capital Accounting (NCA). Bhutan’s strong policy mandate encourages NCA which has important strategic linkages to national and international conservation targets. Conducting NCA, especially for PAs, requires a participatory approach as well as good data. With strong enablers at play, Bhutan can pioneer NCA for PAs to showcase its rich natural capital.
NCA has been gaining recognition in the global conservation agenda especially to account for climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem services degradation, with the System of Environment Economic Accounting (SEEA) serving as a global framework.
The Bhutan government adopted SEEA as the official environmental economic accounting framework in 2012. This allows Bhutan to measure its natural resources, outlined in their national implementation plan for SEEA in Bhutan (2024-2029), which plans to account nine different thematic areas by prioritising accounts based on different timeframes.
Under the SEEA framework, SEEA-Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA-EA) integrates measures of ecosystems and their flow of services with measures of economic and other human activities. Protected Areas (PAs) in Bhutan encompass a variety of ecosystems and using SEEA-EA helps determine the contribution of those ecosystems to their respective PAs whilst also tracking their condition and health over time. Further, accounts such as the ecosystem services and monetary assets account utilise the principles of the System of National Accounts (SNA) to link the contribution of ecosystem services with the economic beneficiaries in the accounting period.
Process of developing NCA for PAs
ICIMOD with DoFPS, Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources of Bhutan, aims to publish NCA guidelines for PAs along with an experimental account for Jigme Dorji National Park (JDNP). Under the leadership of DoFPS, various activities were conducted in 2024 to sensitise and build the capacity of multiple stakeholders to ensure that the process is inclusive and representative of diverse perspectives (Figure 2).
The first set of activities included consultations with the community (20 March 2024 in Barshong village), and with local leaders (22-23 March 2024 in Paro). These consultations helped identify ecosystem assets, ecosystem services, challenges and opportunities in JDNP. During the national-level consultation (25-26 March 2023 in Haa), existing datasets of different agencies were mapped (Figure 3).
The importance of data was emphasised by Lobzang Dorji, then Director of Department of Forest and Park Services, who said, “It is our duty to value the sustainable usage of goods and services that are consumed on a daily basis.” Geley Norbu, Director of National Land Commission, encouraged inter-departmental collaboration for data sharing to take NCA forward.
The consultations were followed up with a technical exercise involving ICIMOD’s experts and an interdisciplinary Geographic Information System/Remote Sensing (GIS/RS) team from different departments in Bhutan to co-create a comprehensive set of accounts for JDNP that would feed into the guidelines (2-5 July 2024). This interdisciplinary team was transformed into a Technical Working Group (TWG) and it was decided that the directors of the respective departments would be part of the Steering Committee (SC).
Creating NCA guidelines is a reiterative process that requires revision and validation of data and any temporal changes, the results from the technical exercise were shared with the Technical Working Group (18-20 March 2024) and Steering Committee (24 March 2024) for further feedback and presented during the national consultation (25 March 2024) in Bhutan (Figure 4).
The consultations were important to build the capacity of the TWG to assess natural capital data of JDNP, receive inputs from PA officials on the NCA guidelines and create a first draft of the guidelines which includes an experimental account of JDNP. This complements other steps which focus on refinement. The final steps are identifying how NCA can help with PA management in terms of improving current conservation as well as identifying new investments.
Strengthening enablers for NCA guidelines development
Raise awareness among all stakeholders
Increasing awareness among stakeholders is necessary to successfully implement NCA guidelines in any given region. The concerned authorities and stakeholders need to be aware of the benefits and incentives of implementing NCA in their region. Stakeholders should include PA managers, authorities of the concerned ministries and departments, local communities (including youths, girls, women, and people from marginalised communities and different ethnic groups), community-based organisations, private sector, non-government organisations, international non-government organisations, and inter-government organisations actively working in the area.
Capacity building
The successful implementation of NCA guidelines and the development of NCA accounts relies on the experience, skills, and capacity of the technical persons and institutions involved. The technical exercise brought together a working group that consisted of experts from different departments along with ICIMOD experts (Figure 5). They engaged in collecting, curating, validating, and analysing the data required for NCA. This engagement along with other future capacity-building programmes will help to strengthen their skills and develop a better understanding of NCA.
Data and information management
Data is a key component for assessing ecosystem stocks and flows while accuracy of the data is crucial for rightly informing the decision-making and planning process of the development of accounts and the formation of a new strategy. Learning from the experience of developing an NCA account for JDNP, it is necessary to form a central data repository system under the National Statistical Bureau (NSB) where data is regularly and effectively updated, curated, managed, and analysed to serve the NCA accounts.
Different consultations that took place in 2024 have laid the foundation for creating the NCA guidelines for Protected Areas. It is a reiterative process that requires a lot of back and forth with multiple stakeholders involved from different government departments, agencies and institutions. The mix of socio-economic, bio-physical and remote-sensing data makes it a robust process which is necessary to showcase the rich natural capital that Bhutan possesses. With strong enablers, it is imperative to build upon it through awareness, capacity building and data management which will help to facilitate the implementation of these guidelines at a national level.
Dawa Zangpo is the Principal Forestry Officer at the Department of Forest and Park Services, Bhutan.
