A resilience perspective of the SEEA B.H. Walker ⁎ , L. Pearson CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, GPO Box 284 Canberra ACT 2601, Australia ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article history: Received 22 November 2005 Received in revised form 6 February 2006 Accepted 20 April 2006 Available online 23 October 2006 While the SEEA is an important advance in national accounting it remains deficient in a number of ways in regard to natural resources. The dynamic and interactive nature of ecosystems means that any linear, compartmentalised system of accounting will miss significant changes that influence human wellbeing. In particular, losses in resilience of critical capital stocks (through changes in underlying ecosystem variables that do not contribute directly to valued flows, and are therefore not included in the accounts) means that the accounts will not recognise that such stocks are becoming riskier, likely to collapse, and are therefore over‐valued. We present a stock‐based approach to measuring sustainable development (the Inclusive Wealth Approach of [Arrow KJ, Dasgupta P and Maler K‐G. (2003) Evaluating projects and assessing sustainable development in imperfect economies, Environmental and Resource Economics, 26:647–685]) at a regional scale, using an example from South East Australia, which includes an assessment of the resilience of critical capital stocks. Crown Copyright © 2006 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Resilience Environmental accounting Sustainability 1. Introduction to SEEA from an ecological perspective The System of Environmental and Economic Accounts (SEEAUN, UN et al., 2003) includes ecosystems as a category of assets, but they have not been as well developed in the SEEA as other categories. The SEEA provides the most extensive treatment/guidelines for assets that provide saleable goods to society, such as minerals or timber. Yet it is increasingly recognised, for example in the Millennium Ecosystem Assess- ment Report (2005), that it is the many and varied ecosystem services provided by the complex functioning of ecosystems that are most essential for human welfare. And most of these are not reflected in the market. The prime motivation for the SEEA has been to develop accounting for the environment in a way that is consistent with the System of National Accounts (SNA) (most recent revision 1993). This has resulted in the SEEA being constructed as an SNA ‘satellite account'. As such, SEEA does not feed into and modify the central system of accounts, but rather adopts the SNA structure and provides specific input where it can be easily included (e.g., assessing costs of environmental protec- tion). Therefore all environmental data are kept separate to allow for further development and maturation of environ- mental accounting within the environment domain, before it influences the current SNA structure. Due to this imposed structure from the SNA not all aspects of the environment are adequately accounted for, including various aspects of ecosystems. A full analysis of ecosystem accounts would address all aspects that influence the value of ecosystems to society, including changes in functionality, spatial and temporal heterogeneity, diversity, and values associated with intrinsic, option and bequest values, in addition to direct use market values. It would also include an assessment of changes in the vulnerability (resilience) of the ecosystems to continued human use. Such a full account is beyond the scope of this paper and our aim is to focus primarily on the last of these issues, namely changes in the dynamics and resilience of ecosystems. The paper is in four sections: an overview of the role of ecosystems in SEEA, the relevance of resilience to SEEA, a case ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS 61 (2007) 708 – 715 ⁎ Corresponding author. Tel.: +61 2 6242 1740; fax: +61 2 6242 1782. E-mail addresses: Brian.Walker@csiro.au (B.H. Walker), Leonie.Pearson@csiro.au (L. Pearson). 0921-8009/$ - see front matter. Crown Copyright © 2006 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2006.04.010 available at www.sciencedirect.com www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon