PEOPLE – EA

The concept of Ecosystem Accounting is an integral part of the Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) conceptual framework that aims at measuring the stocks and flows of natural capital using the international adopted statistics standard for environmental accounting, System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA EA). The standard describes how to account for individual environmental assets or resources, both biotic and abiotic as well as ecosystem assets, biodiversity and ecosystem services. An amendment of the EU Legislation (691/2011) is proposed by Eurostat to the European Parliament and the Council to start regular reporting from the reference year 2024 onwards. Ecosystem Accounts are inherently spatial accounts, with the implication that they strongly depend on the availability of spatially explicit datasets, including Earth Observation. Earth Observation is widely recognized as a major source of information to monitor the extent, condition and services of their ecosystems. The emergence of dense EO data streams at appropriate scales from publicly-funded satellite missions such as the European Copernicus  programme, combined with the advances in digital technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for countries to efficiently monitor the extent and conditions of their ecosystems, determine ecosystem services and implement their ecosystem accounting.

The Pioneer Earth Observation applications for the environment Ecosystem Accounting project (PEOPLE-EA) will studie the relevance of Earth Observation for ecosystem accounts in terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, and develop, validate and showcase a number of advanced EO solutions to produce ecosystem accounts, in physical terms, on ecosystem extent, condition and services. The project will contribute to the international collaborative efforts to advance the use of Earth Observation in Ecosystem Accounting (GEO EO4EA) and support countries developing their national ecosystem accounting. The team will first conduct a comprehensive review of the opportunities and challenges to integrate Earth Observation in SEEA compliant national accounting. Thereafter the team will develop an online tool to support ecosystem accounting at European national and regional scale (Tier-2/3) through combining several state-of-art technologies (INCA accounting models, ARIES  semantic platform, openEO  Earth Observation processing platform). This tool will be used to generate a number of “EO for Ecosystem Accounting” demonstrators that show the value of Earth Observation in national ecosystem accounting of ESA/EU Member States.