Water accounting is a discipline that seeks to provide comprehensive, consistent and comparable policy relevant information related to water. Based on the experience of more than fifty years of national accounts, the discipline that provides the elements to calculate the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) developed the System of Environmental and Economic Accounting for Water (SEEA-Water), which has been adopted by the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC) as a statistical interim standard in 2007.
The SEEA-Water is a conceptual framework for the organization of physical and economic information related to water using concepts, definitions and classifications consistent to those of the System of National Accounts 2008 (2008 SNA). The SEEA-Water framework is an elaboration of the handbook on Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting 2003 (SEEA 2003) which describes the interaction between the economy and the environment and covers the whole spectrum of natural resources and the environment.
To support the implementation of SEEA-Water the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) developed the International Recommendations on Water Statistics (IRWS), which has also been adopted by the UN Member States through the Statistical Commission. The IRWS consolidates the experiences and practices of countries and international organizations.
In Australia, the Water Accounting Standards Board has released standards for producing general purpose water accounting reports. These standards are designed to complement the SEEA-Water, but to support the preparation of reports for a wider audience than statisticians and economists. The development of these type of standards is continuing.
Today more than fifty countries around the world are implementing of planning to implement water accounts.
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