Natural Capital

topic

Natural capital are the world's stocks of natural assets, including geology, soil, air, water, and all living things, from which humans derive a wide range of ecosystem services essential for human life. These services encompass tangible resources like food and water, as well as less visible benefits such as climate regulation, natural flood defenses, and cultural inspiration.

How does Natural Capital contribute to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals?

Sdgs

ARIES mission is to foster knowledge integration for addressing the conservation and sustainable use of both terrestrial and marine natural resources, which are essential for achieving these sustainable development goals. Thanks to the development of the ARIES for SEEA application, ARIES contributes towards standardised and customised natural capital accounting globally, allowing users to integrate their data on natural capital and measure related indicators for the SDGs.

Life below water

Life on land

About the ARIES for SEEA application

Resources

In April 2021, the ARIES for SEEA Explorer was released by the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) in collaboration with the Statistics Division of UNDESA and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) for rapid, standardized and customizable natural capital accounting. Shortly following the adoption of the System of Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting (SEEA) standard by United Nations in March 2021, the ARIES for SEEA Explorer was made available in order to accelerate SEEA’s implementation worldwide on the UN Global Platform.

The ARIES for SEEA Explorer application allows users anywhere in the world to produce rapid, standardized, scalable and customizable ecosystem accounts for their area of interest that are consistent with the SEEA Ecosystem Accounting framework. ARIES for SEEA is available on the UN Global Platform, a cloud-service platform supporting international collaboration in the development of official statistics using new data sources and innovative methods.

ARIES for SEEA applicationFind out more

Read our interoperability strategy for the next generation of SEEA accounting – a document paving the way toward making scientific data and models more interoperable and reusable.