In significant environmental management and climate resilience development, the ARIES team made their 5th technical training in the global south on ARIES for SEEA, this time in Abuja, Nigeria on November 7-10.
This three-day workshop, organized by the World Bank (WB) and the United Nations Statistical Division (UNSD), is a pivotal component of the ongoing support for the development of Nigeria’s natural capital accounting (NCA) system.
ARIES’ NCA team at BC3 formed by Alessio Bulckaen and Caterina Gilli led the session on ARIES for SEEA. They delivered a thorough exploration of the application, providing valuable insights into its capabilities. The training aimed to empower participants in utilizing the application, promoting ecosystem accounting across Africa, and advancing the integration of natural capital’s value into public and private policies and decision-making processes.
The event attracted attendees from various federal ministries of Nigeria, including several environmental specialists. Participants gained proficiency in diverse modeling components, covering interpretation, visualization, and the extraction of diverse results. Notably, they are in the process of successfully integrating local data into the system, fortifying the groundwork for results based on more robust local datasets, when available.
Engaging with experts from both the Kaduna and Nasarawa regions has facilitated meaningful discussions on local data. The significance of local experts’ insights in tailoring models to specific regional cases is even clearer after this experience.
Caterina Gilli
ARIES NCA assistant, BC3
The workshop aligns with the established interoperability strategy for the next generation of SEEA accounting which we have been following since the first training we made in Kenya, Senegal, and Rwanda. This strategy serves as an introduction to shared semantics, an AI engine capable of rendering human knowledge interoperable on a large scale to address intricate social-ecological issues—a fundamental principle underlying the ARIES initiative.
