Towards the revised SEEA

The United Nations Statistical Commission at its thirty-fifth session in March 2005 considered timely to elevate the Handbook of National Accounting: Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting (SEEA) to an international statistical standard. The revised SEEA will be the statistical standard for environmental-economic accounting. It will provide an internationally agreed set of recommendations expressed in terms of concepts, definitions, classifications, accounting rules and standard tables in order to obtain international comparability of environmental-economic accounts and related statistics.

The SEEA revision process has been launched under the management and supervision of the United Nations Committee of Experts on Environmental-Economic Accounting (UNCEEA). The London Group on Environmental Accounting plays an important role in solving the technical issues on the research agenda.

The revised SEEA will build upon its predecessors the SEEA-2003 and the SEEA-1993. In support of the revised SEEA, a suite of publications is being developed. These include standards on specific resources or SEEA modules as well as international recommendations for basic statistics.