About PANCAnet

This is the community collaboration platform for the Pacific Natural Capital Accounting Network, an open network of researchers and practitioners that collaborate to the joint production and use of natural capital accounts (NCA) in the Pacific, to support policy debates and decisions. We want to:

  • Create opportunities to work together on NCA across research, official statistics and policy making
  • Connect the experience of the Pacific to that of other regions
  • Aggregate the knowledge available on NCA in the region – and turn it into policy relevant information
  • Increase policy impact and leverage research capacities around these new accounts
  • Build public interest within the region to sustain efforts around NCA

On this page:

 What We Know: sustainability depends on countries’ official knowledge of the environment and ecosystems

Countries in the Pacific face serious threats related to the environment and its implications for the sustainability of their socio-economic development and livelihoods of their population. Mainstreaming the measurement of ‘natural capital’ as part of the regular data collection programs of national statistical offices and other government agencies gives policy makers precious data that can be instrumental to inform difficult, often even wicked, policy choices for sustainable development. Not only can better measurements improve national decision making, they will also be useful in monitoring and evaluating national and international progress towards sustainable development, including the goals set by the UN within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and regional initiatives such as the SAMOA Pathway for Small Island Developing States. Read more and access resources on NCA in the region…

The Challenge Ahead: linking the production and use of systematic data on natural capital

Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) has been recognized as a key concept for improving the joint management of the economy and the environment. The production and use of the accounts, rather than two consecutive activities, are two deeply intertwined processes. For data (as is the case of accounts on natural capital) to become policy-relevant information (i.e. information on the value of natural resources for a country’s development), and ultimately support actionable policy, accounts need to be generated but also analysed and “used” by people other than the statisticians that produce them.

National policy actors, National Statistical Offices and government scientific agencies as well as research institutions, together with development partners, have a key role to play. Building and using high quality accounts by governments requires cooperation and coordination between different agencies and institutions. In most cases, the accounts need to be analyzed to inform decision making (through modelling for example), and often they need efforts that cross the boundaries of single states, particularly in the Pacific.

Who are we and why this platform?

In collaboration with the WAVES program at the World Bank and with inputs from UN-ESCAP,GDN kick-started a conversation on the link between the production and use of NCA at a regional workshop in Brisbane in March 2017. The recent availability of experimental accounts in a number of countries in the region, facilitated by the work of UN-ESCAP and the WAVES programme in the region, creates a precious opportunity to link researchers, policy-makers and other actors on NCA. GDN and its partners decided to facilitate such collaborations, with the concrete vision to contribute to the growing toolbox at disposal of national and regional policy actors.

This platform is a first, straightforward step in this direction. Its immediate goal is to turn ideas on how to link the production and use of accounts into projects that can be pitched for funding to donors working in the region, and to do so within a set time horizon of 6 months (or earlier) from the launch of a specific idea. Between now and then, the platform will support collaborations between its members, who can join, contribute to or champion specific ‘tracks’, and get feedback from world-class experts, policy makers from the region, donors and professional fundraisers. The idea is to involve in the discussion around one track all the people you think can contribute to it. The platform will be structured directly around members’ proposals on how to link the accounts (whether they exist already or need to be produced/completed) to specific policy relevant questions – in a sentence: your ideas on what questions we could answer using the accounts.

Who is PANCAnet for?

  • We are looking to involve people who have a vision, personal or institutional, or a concrete goal for using NCA, that they want to turn into reality.
  • We are looking to involve people who know who in the region can make the most of NCAs, and are looking for a space to make them work together
  • We are looking to involve people who are interested but feel they do not know enough yet about NCA.
  • We are looking for researchers who believe that there is more to research than publications, and that at the same time believe that the best publications draw on collaborative work with a direct impact on policy and practice.

If you are a researcher, policy maker, civil servant or work in an NGO or international organisation active in the broader Pacific region, request an invitation to the network and join this collaboration.