Slowly stepping out of the COVID-19 restrictions, MAIA organised a workshop on Ecosystem accounting and SEEA EA 2021 on 29 March 2022 in Madrid, Spain. A hybrid format allowed for around 60 people to follow the workshop online and more than 35 MAIA members and stakeholders to attend on site.
The main focus of the workshop was for MAIA partners and the representatives from the various European institutions, such as the European Environment Agency(EEA), the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), the Spanish Statistical Office (INE) and the European Commission to review the current status of SEEA EA development and implementation. The project consortium demonstrated the progress in the ten MAIA countries (Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, Finland, Norway, Belgium, Greece, Bulgaria, France and the Czech Republic) with presentations covering the biophysical and monetary ecosystem accounting in EU member states and globally.
Followed by fruitful knowledge exchange discussions, each session covered important issues related to the contribution of ecosystem services to the economic sector, how they change and develop over time, as well as the national progress in the advancement and incorporation of business models into natural capital accounting.
Moreover, the workshop continued to explore future actions needed to further deploy ecosystem accounting during two roundtables on biophysical and monetary accounts. Amongst the suggestions given by the MAIA partners and some of the stakeholders improvement of the quality of the current European environmental accounting, as well as negotiating further updates on the relevant for the project EU regulations.
“We face an urgent question as an ecosystem accounting community, to not only clarify but also to examine what we do with the monetary and all other values that we find. We have made great progress and should not slow down, we should continue with the great work we have been doing as a community,” project coordinator Prof. Lars Hein comments.
In accordance with this, the idea sharing towards the further actions of the project continued. Some of the most prominent points that were touched upon were related to enhancing the communication between the national teams; taking into consideration the user needs and providing relevant solutions for their needs and organising more frequent national and international meetings for knowledge exchange.
Last but not least, the MAIA workshop ended with a poster presentation showcasing the progress of all of the MAIA involved countries.
The recordings of the different sessions are available on the MAIA YouTube channel.
All of the MAIA poster presentations you can view and download here.
A press release, documenting the event has also been published in the leading science communication platforms EurekAlert and Alpha Galileo.