The Philippine System of National Accounts (PSNA) provides a complete picture of the country's economic performance and enables monitoring of the economy's behavior and structure. The PSNA encompasses economic transactions captured in summary tables and balance sheets referred to as accounts. These accounts are summarized in an integrated, logical, and consistent way using globally accepted standard concepts, definitions, classifications, and accounting standards. The PNSA is underpinned by a globally recognized standard set of guidelines for compiling economic activity statistics in compliance with stringent accounting norms based on economic principles.
However, the SNA has limitations when it comes to accounting for natural capital and taking environmental considerations into account. There are a variety of informal market or non-market products and services, particularly those related to ecosystem services, that are either under-reported or not registered at all. Several of these ecosystem services include use and non-use values for which market pricing does not exist, making it more difficult to quantify. For instance, it does not take into account the value of natural processes, biodiversity loss and ecosystem services, and depletion of environmental assets and future losses.
By assigning a monetary value to the ecosystem services they provide and estimating the cost of replacing those services because of overexploitation, policymakers and decision-makers can gain a better understanding of the trade-offs and develop more informed, cost-effective, and politically feasible solutions that strike a balance between conservation and development. Thus, this training aims to strengthen socioeconomics researchers' competencies needed in ecosystems accounting and to aid them in creating proposals for valuing ecosystem services, which is one of the projects identified in DOST-PCAARRD’s Biodiversity Science and Technology Roadmap for 2022–2032.
The training aims to enhance the knowledge and skills of the socio-economic researchers on ecosystem accounting, particularly on the analytical approaches used in ecosystem accounting, and create a critical mass of socio-economics researchers who will spearhead the ecosystem accounting projects.