Green Accounting and Energy☆
P Bartelmus, Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany
ã 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Accounting for Sustainability
Concepts and Indicators of Sustainable Development
Green Accounting: Assessing the Environmental Sustainability of Economic Growth
Energy: The Ultimate Limit?
The Concepts and Methods of Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting
Material Flow Accounts: Assessing the Physical Metabolism of the Economy
Linking Physical and Monetary Accounts
SEEA: Integrating Physical and Monetary Accounts
Accounting for Energy and Related Impacts
Physical Energy Accounts
Integrated Physical and Monetary Energy Accounts
Accounting in Energy Values
Outlook: Policy Use of Accounting Indicators
Appendix. Monetary Valuation in the SEEA
References
Glossary
Capital maintenance Keeping produced and natural capital
intact as a principle of sustainability of economic activity,
applied in integrative environmental-economic accounts
and analysis.
Dematerialization Reduction of material inputs into the
production and consumption of goods and services as a
means of diminishing environmental pressure from
economic activity.
Energy accounts Accounts and balances, which measure
energy inputs, transformations and uses; they are sometimes
extended to include material flows in embodied
energy values.
Energy theory of value Rationale for the evaluation of
natural resources and goods and services in terms of energy
expended in their production; applied in energy accounts.
Environmental accounting (1) National accounting: short
for integrated environmental and economic accounting, as
advanced by the System for integrated Environmental and
Economic Accounting (SEEA); (2) corporate accounting:
refers usually to environmental auditing but includes also
environmental costing and life-cycle (cradle-to-grave)
assessments of products.
Environmental valuation Different techniques of
estimating a monetary value for natural assets and asset
changes in environmental accounting; they include market
valuation of natural resources, maintenance costing of
environmental impacts and damage valuation of
environmental effects.
Environmentally adjusted (net) capital formation
(ECF) Green accounting indicator that deducts the cost of
natural capital consumption from net capital formation.
☆
Change History: July 2013. P Bartelmus updated the text and further readings to this entire article, and added new Table 3 and Figure 5.
Reference Module in Earth Systems and Environmental Sciences http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-409548-9.01331-2
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Environmentally adjusted (net) domestic product
(EDP) Green accounting aggregate, obtained by deducting
the cost of natural capital consumption from net
domestic product.
Green accounting Popular term for environmental-
economic accounting.
Material flow accounts Physical accounts and balances,
measured in mass (weight) units; they present inputs of
materials into the economy, their accumulation, and their
outflow to other economies, and – as wastes and pollutants –
to the natural environment.
Natural capital Natural assets in their role of natural
resource supply and provision of environmental services
(notably of waste/residual disposal) for economic
production and consumption.
SEEA-Energy Subsystem of the System of Environmental-
Economic Accounts (SEEA), under development by the
United Nations Statistics Division; organizes statistics of
energy stocks and flows in the SEEA framework.
Sustainability (1) Ecological: maintenance of carrying
capacities of people and their activities in territories;
(2) economic: maintenance of produced and non-produced
natural capital for sustaining economic performance
and growth
System of (integrated) Environmental and Economic
Accounts (SEEA) Extended national accounts system,
advanced by the United Nations and other international
organizations; incorporates natural assets and asset uses to
measure the interactions between environment and
economy in physical and monetary units.
Total material input (TMI) Key indicator of material flow
accounts, which measures the total material requirement of
the economy during a particular period of time.
1
2 Green Accounting and Energy

Accounting for Sustainability

Concepts and Indicators of Sustainable Development
Conspicuous pollution incidents in the 1960s and the energy crises of 1973 and 1974 brought about environmental gloom. Well-
known titles like Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ or John Loraine’s ‘Death of Tomorrow’ alerted to risks for human survival. In 1972
the Club of Rome presented the ‘Limits to Growth’ in a computerized and hence seemingly objective world model; the model
predicted the collapse of the industrial system and Malthusian population decline in its business-as-usual scenario.
Ten years later, the United Nations established the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) to find a
global agenda for change. The Commission’s 1987 report advanced the notion of sustainable development to tackle the ‘inter-
locking environmental and developmental crises’ (WCED, 1987, p. 4). Three Earth Summits, convened by the United Nations in
1992 in Rio de Janeiro, in 2002 in Johannesburg and again in Rio in 2012, confirmed sustainable development as a global
paradigm of equal importance for industrialized and developing countries.
The WCED also offered the popular definition of sustainable development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ (WCED, 1987, p. 43). The definition is vague: it
does not specify the categories of human needs, does not give a clear time frame for analysis and policy, and does not define the
roles of the environment and other social concerns in long-term development. The paradigm needs to be operationalized, and
indeed numerous indicators for and of sustainable development have since been advanced.
Indicators for sustainable development typically include long lists of measures of environmental, social, economic, and
institutional aspects of development. Relatively loose frameworks generate useful categorization and classification of indicators,
but do not clearly link or aggregate these indicators. The main drawback of indicator lists is the difficulty of comparing and
evaluating data expressed in different units of measurement. Such indicators may support the management of particular areas of
environmental, social, or economic concern but are less useful for the overall planning and implementation of sustainable
development. Proposals for more compound indices of sustainable development has been the response to the comparability
and aggregation problems. The indices average or otherwise combine selected indicators, or correct conventional economic
aggregates of wealth, production, income and consumption. Well-known examples are the

• Human Development Index (HDI), advance by the United Nations Development Programme. The index is an average of
per-capita income, life expectancy and education, intended to provide a more complete (than GDP) assessment of
human welfare.
• Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI), initiated by the World Economic Forum and implemented by the Yale Center for
Environmental Law and Policy and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN). A high average of
20 indicators (made up of 68 variables) defines environmental sustainability.
• Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) for the United States, later applied and modified in other countries. The GPI subtracts
defensive expenditures (of environmental protection, defense and other welfare maintaining, rather than increasing, expenses)
and adds or subtracts positive and negative environmental and other social costs and benefits.
• Comprehensive and Inclusive Wealth Indices of produced, natural, human and social capital, compiled by the World Bank and
United Nations agencies, respectively.

All these indices suffer from a more or less arbitrary selection of partially correlated indicators, a questionable mix of weighting and
valuation techniques, and inconsistency with standard accounting concepts and conventions. The idea is mainly to demonstrate
the non-sustainability of economic growth, rather than to support policy-making. For instance, the authors of the GPI present their
indicator explicitly to discredit GDP as a measure of social progress (Cobb et al., 1995).

Green Accounting: Assessing the Environmental Sustainability of Economic Growth

The 2012 Rio þ 20 Earth Summit seems to have recognized the problem of measuring the broad, multi-dimensional paradigm of
sustainable development. The Summit’s outcome document, ‘The Future We Want’, focuses more narrowly on a ‘green economy in
the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication’ (United Nations, 2012, para. 12). Sustained economic growth is
considered to be the practical tool of fostering sustainable development. For the assessment of progress towards sustainable
development the Summit recommends setting goals that will require political negotiation and a correspondingly judgmental
selection of indicators.
The elusive notion of sustainability needs to be made operational in a more transparent and systematic manner. To this end,
natural science offers basic principles for the nature-economy interface, and economics provides the tool of accounting for and
evaluating this interface. Thermodynamic laws of matter and energy conservation and dissipation govern the use of natural
resources. Formal double-entry accounting can then be applied to assess the use (input) and dispersion (output) of these resources
from/to the natural environment.
Figure 1 shows the ‘throughput’ of materials (including energy carriers) through the economy. The figure also illustrates the two
basic functions of the environment: (1) resource supply of raw materials, space and energy to the economy, the source function,
and (2) assimilation of wastes and pollutants, the sink function. The latter represents an important ecological service. Other
 Green Accounting and Energy 3

Figure 1 Environment-economy interaction and effects. Natural resources flow from the environment into the economy and out of the economy into
the environment. Outputs from the economy and the environment affect human welfare. From Bartelmus, P. (2001). Accounting for sustainability:
greening the national accounts. In Tolba, M.K. (ed.) (2001) Our fragile world, challenges and opportunities for sustainable development, Oxford: Eolss
Publishers, Figure 1, with permission from EOLSS Publishers.

ecosystem services such as life support, habitat for species, soil protection and climate control are sometimes categorized as indirect
benefits for humans; they are probably better assessed by localized environmental statistics.
The fortunate coincidence of physical laws, which ensure the equality of inputs and outputs of energy and materials, and input-
output based economic accounting points to an obvious approach of applying the latter to the former. The result is green
accounting – that is, the extension of conventional economic accounts into the physical world of the use and abuse of nature by
economic activity.
The application of accounting tools requires aggregation of physical environmental data by means of a common measuring rod.
Environmentalists and economists – to make a crude distinction between ecological and economic views of the human
environment – disagree on whether to use physical measures, or prices and costs, for weighting the importance of environmental
impacts. Environmental economists seek to ‘internalize’ the unaccounted-for ‘external’ costs of environmental impacts into the
plans and budgets of households and enterprises. Environmentalists, on the other hand, refute such commodification of an
indivisible (public) good on whose value markets should not have a say.
Two operational sustainability concepts can be distinguished according to the economic and ecological outlook:

• Economic sustainability makes use of the necessary prerequisite for economic growth, capital maintenance, and extends the
(produced) capital concept to include non-produced natural capital.
• Ecological sustainability considers material throughput through the economy as pressure on the carrying capacities and the
resilience of natural systems to withstand the pressure; ecological sustainability seeks to decrease throughput for the maintenance
of carrying capacity.

Physical and monetary accounts attempt to capture these notions of sustainability. Material flow accounts (MFA) and related
physical input-output tables (PIOT) measure material flows in physical – weight – units. The United Nations System for integrated
Environmental and Economic Accounting (SEEA) includes both physical and monetary accounts, seeking compatibility with the
worldwide-adopted System of National Accounts (SNA). Considering the integrative power of the SEEA, the 1992 Earth Summit
called for its application by all member States of the United Nations in its Agenda 21. An international group of experts and
accountants has now revised the SEEA. In 2012, the Statistical Commission of the United Nations adopted a curtailed version of the
SEEA as a ‘central framework’. The idea is to include only those stocks and flows of natural assets that are economic in nature; they
are relatively easy to account for, as they are part of the conventional national accounts. Environmental degradation, notably from
pollution, on the other hand, is not included in the national accounts, but is left to further ‘experimental ecosystem accounts’.
The narrow focus on ecological and economic sustainability by green accounting does not do justice to the much broader
notion of sustainable development. Sustainable development encompasses, besides economic and environmental objectives,
social and institutional, and possibly also cultural and political ones. Measurability and aggregation of mostly non-material
concerns are reasons for the focus of green accounting on economic and environmental assets and their services for economic
performance and growth.

Energy: The Ultimate Limit?

Energy analysts and ecological economists deplore the neglect of energy in mainstream economic analysis. In their view, energy is
the ultimate source of life and, at the same time, its ultimate limit. Accounting for energy values embodied in goods and services is
their approach to assess the sustainability of both the economy and the environment (see Section ‘Integrated Physical and
Monetary Energy Accounts’). Energy accounts could thus be seen as an alternative to material flow accounting. Georgescu-Roegen
(1979, p. 1040) suggested, therefore, to ‘keep two separate books – one for matter and one for energy’.
4 Green Accounting and Energy

The reasons for the general neglect of energy in sustainability analysis include low and incomplete costing of energy production
and use, and under-pricing of energy resources. Prices that ignore the social costs of energy depletion and pollution create, however,
a delusion of abundance and might undermine the sustainability of economic activity. Subsidies, notably of labor-intensive fossil
fuel production, may increase employment but aggravate under-pricing and environmental impacts.
Climate change is often taken as a surrogate for overall environmental degradation. Excessive emissions of greenhouse gases are
responsible for global warming; they are emitted in particular in energy production, transformation and use. Global energy
balances reveal how greenhouse gases trap solar energy flows when part of them is returned to the atmosphere. The problem is
to trace energy uses and their emissions to different production and consumption processes. The significance of energy production
and consumption for the sustainability of economic development needs to be assessed in greater detail by means of economic and
environmental accounting.
The following section describes the general concepts and methods of such accounting. Section ‘Accounting for Energy and
Related Impacts’ shows how environmental accounting applies to energy production and consumption and related environmental
impacts. It does not elaborate on the different techniques of narrowly defined physical energy balances and analyses. Rather, the
section shows how energy fits into the environmental-economic accounting frame and how energy accounts may help assess the
sustainability of economic performance and growth.

The Concepts and Methods of Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting

Material Flow Accounts: Assessing the Physical Metabolism of the Economy
Figure 2 can be viewed as the accounting interpretation of the generic environment-economy interface of Figure 1. It represents
the material flow accounts (MFA), which Robert Ayres and Marina Fischer-Kowalski characterized as picturing the physical
metabolism of society. The MFA show material inputs from abroad and the natural environment, their accumulation as stock in
infrastructures and other durable goods, and their output of wastes and residuals into the environment and as exports to other
countries. The MFA were developed in Austria and Germany and mostly applied in industrialized countries. The statistical office of
the European Union, Eurostat, prepared guidelines on economy-wide MFA for improving the international comparability of
the accounts.
Adding up the material flows (in tons) obtains various indicators at different stages of throughput. Perhaps best known is total
material input (TMI), defined as the sum of domestic extraction and imports of natural resources, including so-called ecological
rucksacks. The rucksacks are hidden flows that do not become a physical part of any product but are associated with its production,
use and disposal (e.g., soil erosion from agriculture and forestry, or gangue from mining). Material inputs include fossil fuels and
biological energy sources harvested by agriculture and forestry. The counterpart of TMI is total material output (TMO) consisting of
wastes and emissions, including greenhouse gases from energy production and use and other economic activities. As shown in
Figure 2 the balance of material inputs and outputs is accumulation of materials in the economy during an accounting period.
Scholars of the German Wuppertal Institute, who focused their work on compiling and analyzing material flow accounts, have
argued that their indicators measure actual and potential, and possibly still unknown, environmental impacts. A downward trend
of the TMI, together with the usual upward trend of economic output (GDP), would thus indicate a decoupling of environmental
pressure from economic growth. This can be seen as a process of dematerialization of the economy that may attain ecological

Figure 2 Summary of material flow accounts of the European Union 1996 (billion tons). The total mass of primary material inputs equals the mass of
accumulation of materials in the economy plus total material outputs of wastes and emissions. Based on Bringezu, S. (2002). Towards sustainable
resource management in the European Union, Wuppertal Papers No. 121, Figure 2.1, Wuppertal, Germany: Wuppertal Institute for Climate,
Environment and Energy.
 Green Accounting and Energy 5

sustainability. Overall indicators like the TMI or TMO are, however, relatively crude measures of environmental impact since they
use the weight of material inputs and emissions for weighting the significance of potential environmental effects.

Linking Physical and Monetary Accounts

The MFA were not developed in consistency with economic concepts and measures. Their purpose was, at least initially, to provide
an alternative to misleading – with regard to the human quality of life – accounting aggregates such as GDP. As a result, the MFA
differ from standard and extended accounting and indicators (see Section ‘SEEA: Integrating Physical and Monetary Accounts’),
notably with regard to the following:

• Narrow focus on material flows, excluding stocks and stock changes of produced and natural assets
• Corresponding inability of flow indicators such as the TMI to assess permanent losses (depletion and degradation beyond
regeneration) of natural assets – an essential concern of sustainability
• Focus on different categories of materials by the MFA, rather than on the economic sectors responsible for the consumption of
natural resources and the emission of residuals
• Assumption that material inputs reflect potential environmental impacts, as opposed to the costs of actual impacts during a
specific accounting period
• Use of physical (mass) units of measurement rather than the monetary (price and cost) values of economic accounts.

The conventional national accounts faced mounting criticism for ignoring environmental impacts. The accountants sought,
therefore, to incorporate environmental data into their frameworks, in other words, to ‘green’ the national accounts. They made
use of Leontief-type input-output tables, whose monetary counterparts are actually a part of the national accounts. The result is a
relatively weak integration of environmental data, either into a purely physical input-output table (PIOT) or as an add-on of
physical indicators into the conventional accounts. The ad-on approach generates hybrid physical-monetary accounts such as the
Dutch National Accounting Matrix including Environmental Accounts (NAMEA).
Carsten Stahmer and his colleagues at the German Federal Statistical Office pioneered a comprehensive PIOT for 1990 and updated
the tabulations for 1995. The German PIOT is basically a sectoralization of the aggregate MFA: it specifies the material and substance
flows as inputs and outputs in a detailed breakdown by industries and institutional sectors. Stock/asset accounts of produced capital
and natural resources are omitted, as are difficult-to-assess-and-allocate ecological rucksacks. Supplementary sub-tables present energy
balances in terms of inputs, outputs and transformations of energy carriers, measured in calorific values (terajoules).
The NAMEA goes further by linking physical with monetary data. It stops short of any monetary valuation of environmental
impacts by juxtaposing environmental statistics and indicators next to the economic activities responsible for environmental
impacts. Like the PIOT, the NAMEA incorporates impacts on the source and sink functions of the environment in its supply
(output) and use (input) accounts, as shown in Figure 3. In addition, the NAMEA presents some further weighting (in terms of
theme equivalents) and aggregation for national environmental themes. The themes include energy, acidification, eutrophication,
greenhouse gas emissions, ozone layer depletion, and loss of natural resources (of gas and oil).
Figure 3 is a simplified structure of a hybrid accounting system, based on the NAMEA approach. It presents the conventional
economic accounts of production, consumption, capital accumulation, income generation, and international trade. Below and to the
right of these accounts, material and substance flow accounts are added to the economic transaction rows and columns of the economic
accounts. The physical flows are shown as shaded areas in the printed version of this article and in green color in the online version.

Industries 1, 2, ... Final demand

PHYSICAL Material
USE (by) SUPPLY (of) Capital formation Rest of the world
flows (natural resources,
Households residuals)
and accumulation (ROW)

Emissions from
Outputs (including Intermediate consump- Final consumption Capital formation Exports industries and
imports) tion households

Income Value added, NDP

Imports of natural
Rest of the world (ROW) Capital transfer to Balance of
Imports resources and
ROW payments
residuals

PHYSICAL material Natural resource Natural resource use, Net accumulation of Exports of natural
flows (natural inputs, residuals ‘consumption’ of materials and resources and Physical balances
resources, residuals) received residuals substances residuals

Figure 3 Simplified structure of a NAMEA. The hybrid accounts show physical material flows next to economic activities as material inputs or
discharges of residual outputs. Physical balances represent the accumulation of materials in inventories or durable capital goods. From P. Bartelmus
(2013), Fig. 8.2, with permission by Routledge; adapted from Keuning and de Haan (1998), Table 1, pp. 146–147.
6 Green Accounting and Energy

The NAMEA can thus be seen as a PIOT, linked to a monetary input-output table with some further supplementary indicators for
selected environmental policy themes.

SEEA: Integrating Physical and Monetary Accounts

Physical accounts do not have the integrative power of the monetary national accounts. Weighting environmental impacts by the
weight of substance and resource flows may alert us to trends of overall environmental pressures and serve the management of
particular natural resources. Physical accounts cannot, however, compare the significance of environmental problems with
economic costs and benefits. Calculating ratios of resource productivity (GDP/TMI) or eco-efficiency (environmental impacts
per GDP) is the most one can do to relate physical impacts to economic output.
The original 1993 SEEA considered monetary valuation as the only possibility of fully integrating environmental concerns into
the economic accounting system while ensuring consistency and comparability of greened with conventional economic indicators.
Aware of the aggregation problem of physical flows, the revised 2012 SEEA leaves comprehensive aggregation in weight units to
work on material flow accounts by the statistical office of the European Union, Eurostat, and the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD). For ‘individual’ natural assets, notably energy and water, the revised SEEA recommends
the compilation of physical aggregates in tons, joules and cubic meters. Special handbooks on water, land and ecosystems, and
energy (see Section ‘Accounting for Energy and Related Impacts’) elaborate.
Pricing ‘priceless’ environmental source and sink functions that are not traded in markets has its own problems. National
accountants have been reluctant to implement environmental accounts in monetary terms. They seem to believe that they might
lose some of their longstanding goodwill if they let in new controversial concepts and valuations, even through supplementary
‘satellite’ accounts. The 2012 SEEA recommends, therefore, the use of market valuation for those natural assets that fetch a market
price when extracted and used in the economy. This facilitates the inclusion in the SEEA since these ‘economic’ assets are covered in
the conventional asset accounts. The only difference is the shift of the value of their depletion from the asset accounts into the
production and income accounts for subtraction as cost from conventional economic indicators. In contrast, the original SEEA
included also environmental degradation costs and recommended deducting both cost categories to obtain ‘environmentally
adjusted’ economic indicators.
Figure 4 shows how source and sink functions of the natural environment can both be consistently integrated in the national
accounts by

• Incorporating environmental assets as natural capital – in addition to produced (fixed) economic capital – into the asset
accounts of the SNA
• Costing the depletion and degradation of natural assets as natural capital consumption (EC) in addition to, and in consistency
with, fixed capital consumption (CC) in the asset and supply and use accounts
• Maintaining the accounting identities for the definition and calculation of environmentally adjusted net indicators of value
added (EVA), domestic product (EDP), and capital formation (ECF).
Environmental protection expenditures could be shown explicitly as ‘thereof’ items of the supply and use of products in Figure 4.
Both SEEA versions identify these expenditures in appropriate classifications but do not suggest their deduction from GDP as a
defense against welfare losses (cf. Section ‘Concepts and Indicators of Sustainable Development’). The reasons are problems of
distinguishing defensive from welfare increasing expenditures, and welfare valuation, which is not compatible with the exchange
values of market prices in the national accounts.
Accounting for natural capital consumption and maintenance (through reinvestment) extends the sustainability notion, built
into the conventional net indicators of value added and capital formation, into the field of environmental services for the economy.
In analogy to the wear and tear (i.e., the ultimate destruction) of capital goods in the production process, natural capital loss is
defined as the permanent loss of natural resource stocks and waste absorption capacities. This definition clarifies the content of
physical depletion and degradation, which can be offset by natural regeneration and replenishment. Regeneration and replenish-
ment of nature can be seen as a cost-free natural repair process.
The costing of capital maintenance avoids controversial damage (to the health of humans and ecosystems) valuation. It can be
argued from an economic, utility maximizing, optimality point of view that such welfare effects are the correct values for
internalizing environmental cost into the budgets of households and enterprises. The purpose of the national accounts is however
not welfare analysis or modeling of optimal behavior but the ex-post assessment of economic performance. The appendix reviews
briefly different valuation methods for green accounting.

Accounting for Energy and Related Impacts

Environmental impacts from energy production and use, notably on climate change, are sometimes presented as the principal
environmental problem (cf. Section ‘Concepts and Indicators of Sustainable Development’). They do not tell, though, the whole
sustainability story and might overshadow other issues such as deforestation, water shortage, pollution and poverty. The above-
described accounting systems provide a more comprehensive assessment of the environment-economy interaction. This
 Green Accounting and Energy 7

Figure 4 SEEA: structure and main indicators. The integrated accounting system incorporates environmental and natural–economic–assets into the
conventional flow and stock accounts and defines new environmentally adjusted (‘green’) economic indicators. Based on Bartelmus P. (2001).
Accounting for sustainability: greening the national accounts. In Tolba, M.K. (ed.) (2001). Our fragile world, challenges and opportunities for sustainable
development, Oxford: Eolss Publishers, Figure 3, with permission from EOLSS Publishers.

section illustrates how the part of energy is handled by the latest (2012) version of the SEEA. The United Nations are currently
developing a SEEA handbook for energy accounting. The handbook picks up international recommendations for energy statistics
while seeking coherence with the SEEA. A detailed technical description of energy statistics and balances is beyond this article and
would also be more relevant for the management of selected energy categories than for overall environmental and sustainability
policies. Much of the following review of energy accounting is based on the 2012 SEEA and draft chapters of the SEEA-Energy
handbook (SEEA-E).

Physical Energy Accounts

Physical energy balances are an established tool of energy statistics, described in detail in International Recommendations for
Energy Statistics (IRES). They present the origin and destination of energy flows in calorific values or other energy equivalents. They
are also quite similar to the physical supply and use accounts of the SEEA, differing only because of the SEEA’s close connection to
the national accounts. The differences stem mainly from

• Geographical coverage: energy balances apply the territorial principle, recording imports and exports for institutions that are
physically located in the territory of a country; in contrast, the SEEA records imports and exports for residents of a country
wherever they might be located (according to the residence principle)
• Corresponding differences in the definition of supply and use and final consumption of energy
• Different classification of economic activities.

The 2012 SEEA covers also wastes and emissions more comprehensively than the IRES and the forthcoming SEEA-E. IRES and
SEEA-E include only ‘losses’ of energy as emissions into the environment. Any comprehensive assessment of environmental
impacts from energy production and use would therefore have to resort to further analysis of the full range of residuals generated
by energy-related economic activities such as mining, forestry, electricity generation, transport and other high-energy users of
industry and households. The IRES describe such analysis as a use of energy statistics rather than energy statistics themselves. It does
discuss, though, the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the estimation of greenhouse gas
emissions from any combustion source by appropriate emission factors.
8 Green Accounting and Energy

Perhaps best suited for detailed energy accounting within the frameworks of the national accounts and the SEEA are the above-
described physical input-output tables (PIOT). Table 1 illustrates the approach taken in supplementary energy tables of the PIOT.
The table can also be interpreted as an elaboration of the physical part of the hybrid NAMEA (Figure 3) for energy inputs and
outputs. The SEEA presents these tables as physical supply and use accounts, economy-wide and for energy. As in the NAMEA, the
comprehensive flow of residual substances (beyond energy losses) could of course be added and possible also expressed in
embodied calorific values; they could be shown as outputs of energy production and consumption and as inputs into the treatment
of residuals, nature and the rest of the world.
The flow accounts of the PIOT do not show stocks of produced or natural capital, but stock changes only, as accumulation. As a
consequence, periodic inputs and outputs balance only in the non-accumulative flows for industries and households. The last row
of Table 1 indicates imbalances for produced assets and non-produced natural assets and foreign trade. The trade balance is
negative, reflecting a net import of energy products.
Physical flow accounts do not measure the ultimate objective of energy use, namely the production of energy services like
heating, transportation or work. As a proxy, the energy PIOT includes various categories of final, or useful, energy. Most energy
accounts exclude, however, the nutritional energy supply to humans and animals, needed for work and drive power, as well as
important new and renewable energy flows. Inclusion of these flows would permit a comprehensive assessment of the ‘energetic
metabolism’ (Haberl, 2001, p. 11) of societies as a complement to the ‘societal’ (material) metabolism measured by material
flow accounts.
Depletion of energy resources, i.e. their permanent loss, affects the sustainability of economic activity. Depletion requires
knowledge about the availability of a resource, which can be measured as a stock and stock change in asset accounts. Table 2
presents the format and ‘illustrative data’ of a physical asset account for energy and mineral resources as described in the 2012
SEEA. The SEEA uses different classes of the availability and economic feasibility of natural resources, following the specifications
of the IRES. The national accounts include only proven subsoil resources that obtain an economic value in markets; they
correspond to SEEA class A of commercially recoverable resources, but with a somewhat higher level of confidence about their
availability. In addition, the SEEA recommends also the use of Class B (potentially commercially recoverable resources) and C
(non-commercial and other known deposits) for the mineral and energy asset accounts. Class C thus includes in the physical
accounts also resources that do not have an economic value. Note that metallic minerals include uranium and thorium.
During the accounting period, the stocks of resources can be increased through discoveries of new deposits. New knowledge
about the extent of a deposit and government regulation of its operation can add to or reduce the resource stock. Extractions and
catastrophic destruction diminish the stock.
The assessment of the depletion of renewable energy resources is more complex, since processes of natural re-growth of biotic
(fuel wood) and replenishment of cyclical (water) resources, as well as capital formation (afforestation) need to be taken into
account. The idea is to obtain the net amount of the permanent loss of the resource, beyond its sustainable yield. The determination

Table 1 PIOT for Energy Balancesa

Supply Industries 1, 2 etc Accumulation Household Rest of the world

consumption (ROW)
Produced assets Non-produced
natural assets

Inputs
Raw materialsb xc
Productsd x xe x x
Waste for incineration x
Useful energy to naturef x
Energy losses to nature x
Outputs
Raw materialsb x
Productsd x xg x
Waste for incineration x
Useful energyf x x
Energy losses x x
Inputs minus outputs x(þ) x(þ) x()
a
Unit of measurement: calorific value, for example, joule or ton of oil equivalent.
b
Energy carriers and hydropower.
c
Energy production (electricity, mining).
d
Fuelwood, electricity, gas, coal, oil, natural gas, chemical and petroleum products, etc.
e
Change in stocks.
f
Light, heat.
g
Cultivated natural assets (forestry, fishery).
Source: Based on a case study for Germany (Stahmer, C., Kuhn, M. and Braun, N. (1998). Physical input-output tables for Germany 1990. Eurostat Working Paper No. 2/1998/B/1.
Luxembourg: Eurostat, Tables 4 and 5).
 Green Accounting and Energy 9

Table 2 Physical Asset Account for Energy and Mineral Resources, Class A (physical units)

Type of mineral and energy resource

Oil resources Natural gas (m3) Coal& peat (‘000 tonnes) Non-metallic Metallic
(‘000 bushels) (tonnes) (‘000 tonnes)

OPENING STOCK 800 1200 600 150 60

Additions to stock
Discoveries 20
Reappraisals 200 40
Reclassifications
Total 200 40 20
Reductions in
stock
Extractions 40 50 60 10 4
Catastrophic losses
Reappraisals 60
Reclassifications
Total 40 50 120 10 4
CLOSING STOCK 760 1350 480 180 76

Source: Based on European Commission et al. (2012), Table 5.5.3.

of sustainable yield requires complex modeling for specific yield uses such as fuel wood from timber production, or water use for
hydropower or cooling. In practice, the overall change in the physical amount and value of a resource between opening and closing
stocks is frequently taken as a proxy for its depletion. For example, the sustainable cut of forests is usually measured as the net
increase in forest biomass after felling, natural losses from disease or fire, natural re-growth, and reforestation. This simplification
neglects, however, changes in the composition and age structure of the forest that may affect future yields and economic returns.
Similarly, changes in the assimilative capacity of environmental media, owing to natural and human-made restoration, should
be taken into account when estimating the net emissions from energy production and use that cannot be safely absorbed by natural
systems. These emissions overload nature’s assimilative capacities and should be treated as (non-sustainable) environmental
externalities.
The 2012 SEEA and the SEEA-E include both the flow of renewables but do not account for their stocks and depletion. The
reasons given are that the primary purpose of biological resources is not energy production, and wind and solar energy are not
considered physical assets since they cannot be exhausted. As in the conventional national accounts, assets of inventories of energy
products are accounted as accumulation in both the physical and monetary flow accounts.

Integrated Physical and Monetary Energy Accounts

Sections ‘Linking Physical and Monetary Accounts’ and ‘SEEA: Integrating Physical and Monetary Accounts’ described the
integration of physical and monetary accounts in the SEEA. A common measuring rod like the currency unit used in the SNA
provides the strongest integration of diverse stocks and flows. The SEEA-2012 applies such monetary valuation only to those
natural resources that obtain a market price after extraction or for which such a price can be estimated. Overall, it adopts a relatively
weak integration of economic and environmental stocks and flows in NAMEA-type hybrid accounts; yet, it considers such
integration as one of its strongest features. The original 1993 SEEA adopted monetary valuation for both, source and sink functions,
of the environment; it reflected therefore strong integration throughout its system. The following discussion of energy stocks and
flows is based on both versions of the SEEA.
The main advantages of monetary energy accounts over physical accounts and balances are:

• Comparability of different energy stocks with each other and with other environmental and economic assets in comprehensive
wealth estimates of the economy
• Costing of changes in stock as capital consumption from a sustainability point of view, including the depletion of nonrenew-
able (fossil) and renewable (biological) energy sources
• Comparability of conventional economic indicators of the energy sector (capital formation, value added, cost, income, etc.)
with environmentally (cost-) adjusted indicators.
The monetary asset accounts follow the structure of the physical asset accounts, shown in Table 2, with one addition for price
changes of the resources and possible changes in valuation methods: a revaluation item measures the monetary gains and losses
of just holding the asset. For energy stocks, measuring the cost of their depletion is a key objective. Such costing permits assessing
the contribution of the use of energy resources to ‘economic sustainability’ in terms of economy-wide capital maintenance
(cf. Section ‘Green Accounting: Assessing the Environmental Sustainability of Economic Growth’). The SEEA-2012 argues,
10 Green Accounting and Energy

however, for a broader sustainability notion that accounts also for catastrophic losses and discoveries. At the same time, it restricts
the adjustment of economic indicators to depletion costs that exclude the costs and gains of catastrophe and discovery. The values
of these impacts are recorded as other volume changes in the monetary asset accounts and do therefore not affect the costs and
benefits of production and income.
Besides the treatment of discoveries and catastrophic losses, the accounting for energy resources is also affected by their scope,
defined by knowledge about their existence and the feasibility of their exploitation (cf. Section ‘Physical Energy Accounts’). The
SEEA 2012 recommends that only class A resources of highest economic and social feasibility and project status should be valued.
This comes close to the concept of ‘proven reserves’ of the national accounts and the 1993 SEEA. As mentioned, class A resources
include also those, for which confidence in the ‘geological knowledge’ is moderate or even low. This creates a hardly necessary
deviation from the conventional asset accounts.
Subsoil energy carriers are nonrenewable resources. Any extraction depletes by definition the total availability of the resource,
regardless of any discoveries of new deposits. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) (in a one-time case study) disagreed and
treated discoveries as economic production (development) of a capital good. This approach might offset the depletion cost of a
nonrenewable resource, turning it statistically into a renewable one. Consequently, the total value of stocks of mineral reserves in
the United States has not changed much in the BEA study, at least for the period covered.
The SNA sees catastrophic losses, discoveries and natural increases (by growth or replenishment) of economic assets as the result
of external conditions rather than of economic transactions. From an economic sustainability point of view, the impacts of
earthquakes or floods on the availability of natural assets were not planned and budgeted like the ‘normal’ wear and tear of a capital
good. This holds also for discoveries, which might be hoped for when investing in exploration. Exploration costs are actually
treated as capital formation but should not be confused with nature’s ‘generation’ of the (discovered) resource stock itself. The SEEA
and its energy manual do not consider, therefore, discovery of a natural resource as capital formation and its destruction or
degradation by natural disaster as a production cost; rather they record these value changes, as in the SNA, in the asset accounts.
Environmentalists, on the other hand, would be more concerned with impacts on environmental conditions, whether caused
by the economy or by nature. They might account for ‘ecological sustainability’, i.e. the maintenance of environmental conditions
and its effects on human well-being, in both physical and monetary accounts. The measurement and comparison of economic and
ecological sustainability is indeed a topic that deserves further discussion in the next revision of the SEEA.
The monetary flow accounts of the revised SEEA do not show any flows of resources and pollutants that cross the boundary of
the economy to and from the environment. Its supply and use accounts present therefore only the supply of energy ‘products’ by
type and their uses as intermediate and final consumption. Emissions of wastes and pollutants are not valued, and environmental
degradation is consequently excluded. In contrast, the original SEEA considers the impairment of the sink functions as an integral
part of environmental accounting; it treats the resulting environmental degradation as a further cost of natural capital consumption
by industries and households.
The SEEA revision made significant progress in elaborating what is in principle already covered in the conventional accounts.
This includes the above-described physical and monetary asset accounts of energy sources and the energy-related responses to
environmental concerns. The latter include

• The cost of resource management for maintaining the stock of energy resources
• Environmental protection expenditures for dealing with emissions of energy production and use, in particular of CO2 and SO2
• Environmental policy tools such as eco-taxes, subsidies, and tradable and non-tradable permits for energy extraction and
harvest and discharges of related residuals
• Other economic transactions of payments (rents) for using government-owned energy resources, capital formation in energy
exploration and equipment, and the final disposal of capital such as the costly ‘decommissioning’ of nuclear facilities or oil rigs.
In principle, all these activities are defined and described in the SNA. The SEEA and its energy handbook provide, however, more
detail about policy responses to energy-related environmental impacts.

Accounting in Energy Values

The purpose of monetary estimates of economic (private) and environmental (social) costs is to assess the environmental-
economic sustainability of economic activity. However, some energy analysts and ecological economists appear to share Malcolm
Slesser’s view that monetary valuation is ‘after all nothing more than a highly sophisticated value judgement’ (Slesser, 1975,
p. 170). They suggest, therefore, the use of energy values or potentials for measuring the natural value of goods and services –
independent of volatile market preferences. Different valuation principles apply:

• Exergy, the potential work content of materials, energy carriers and residuals
• Emergy, the energy memory of the total amount of energy of one kind, required directly and indirectly to make a product or
service (advanced in the writings of the late Howard Odum).

The main critique of these energy valuations is, in turn, about the neglect of individual value judgments or preferences of economic
agents. Additional more practical problems are the data and knowledge requirements for a myriad of different production and
transformation processes that use energy and generate emissions and discharges. Energy value accounting does therefore not seem
 Green Accounting and Energy 11

to be capable of capturing the overall interaction of environment and economy. It could provide useful supplementary information
for energy policies and management, but is less likely to become a tool of overall assessments of economic or ecological
sustainability.

Outlook: Policy Use of Accounting Indicators

Most of the physical indicators presented in the revised SEEA and its companion report on energy accounts are part of basic
environmental and energy statistics, or have been advanced in separate indicator frameworks and listings. Rather than reviewing
the wide range of uses of all these indicators, this section focuses on the initial main concern of green accounting – the assessment
of sustainability. As explained by the World Commission on Environment and Development, sustainability is a matter of
integrating environmental, social and economic concerns in policy making. Integrated policies of sustainable growth and
development require integrated economic and environmental indicators as presented in greened accounts.
Table 3 provides a framework for sustainability accounting and analysis; it caters to two key operational – economic and
ecological – sustainability concepts. The table sets out from the rationale and strategies of reducing material throughput through
dematerialization and of sustaining economic growth through capital maintenance. The corresponding physical and monetary
accounting tools and indicators measure relatively strong and weak sustainability, respectively. Compliance with minimum
standards for the preservation of critical (irreplaceable) capital is to attain strong sustainability. On the other hand, monetary
accounts and their adjusted economic indicators imply substitutability of different capital categories and production factors. They
assess weak sustainability of the overall value of capital.
Reducing material flows into the economy, as represented in particular by their sum total, TMI, aims at decoupling economic
growth from the generation of environmental impacts. The question is, how much dematerialization makes economic growth
sustainable? Since physical material flows are not measured in money units they are not directly comparable to economic output or
income. All one can do is to compare the speed of indicator changes over time. Standards or targets can set desirable rates of
economic growth and throughput reduction. Ernst von Weizsäcker advanced the ‘Factor 4’ target of halving material input into the
economy while doubling wealth over a period of 3 to 5 decades. Factor 4 and other even higher targets seek to decouple
environmental impacts from economic growth.
A collaborative study, published by the World Resources Institute, showed that TMI per capita has been leveling off for selected
industrialized countries (Germany, Netherlands, the United States) at about 80 tons per annum, except for Japan at 45 tons
(because of its low per-capita energy use). Given that GDP per capita has been rising in these countries, there is some – relative –
decoupling from growth, albeit far from the sustainability target of Factor 4. At least in these countries, ecological sustainability has
not been in sight during the accounting periods of the study (1975–93).
Specific energy accounts, such as those presented by the forthcoming SEEA-Energy manual can assess the decoupling of energy
flows and energy-related emissions from sectoral and overall economic growth. As mentioned, climate change is often used as a
proxy for overall environmental deterioration. CO2 emission, notably from fuel combustion and accumulation in the atmosphere,
is the main cause for climate change. Inventories of CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases (GHG) are typically compiled
outside the accounting frameworks. The international recommendations for energy statistics (IRES) describe in some detail energy-
related GHG according to guidelines for GHG inventories by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The
inventories can provide statistical input for energy accounts and models of the cost of climate change. A comparison of the rather

Table 3 Concepts, Indicators and Policies of Environmental Sustainability

Ecological sustainability: dematerialization/detoxification Economic sustainability: produced and natural capital

maintenance

Rationale Reducing throughput to sustain carrying capacities Sustaining economic growth

Strategy Decoupling economic growth from environmental pressure Maximizing economic growth while keeping produced
and natural capital intact
Accounting tools Material flow accounts, physical input-output tables, hybrid System for integrated environmental and economic
accounts accounting (SEEA)
Key indicators TMI, TMO and related indicators of material consumption and Green economic aggregates: EDP, EVA, ECF, total
resource productivity (comprehensive) wealth
Strength of Strong: reduction of material and substance flows to meet Weak: overall maintenance of the value of capital,
sustainability sustainability standards (Factor X targets), maintenance of allowing substitution between produced and natural
critical capital capital and other production factors
Policy instruments Rules and regulations, enforcement of standards, Use of green economic indicators in economic analysis
prescriptions for production and consumption processes and policy; market instruments of environmental cost
internalization

Source: Adapted from Bartelmus, P. (2003). Dematerialization and capital maintenance: two sides of the sustainability coin, Ecological Economics 46, 61–81, Table 1, with
permission.
12 Green Accounting and Energy

normative Stern review of the economics of climate change with the Nordhaus model on optimal climate policy exemplifies the
different assessments of and policy recommendations for climate change by environmentalists and economists.
Costing produced and natural capital consumption serves to reserve funds for reinvestment and hence capital maintenance.
At the macroeconomic level, the deduction of these costs from GDP obtains EDP, a net indicator whose decrease would indicate
non-sustainable economic growth. Case studies of the SEEA, as presented, for instance, by Kimio Uno and Peter Bartelmus, did not
show a reversal of (upward) GDP trends by EDP. This does not necessarily confirm sustainability because of the relatively short
time series available.
A more pertinent way of looking into the sustainability of economic performance would be to measure a nation’s ability to
generate new capital after taking produced and natural capital consumption into account. Estimates of Environmentally adjusted
net Capital Formation (ECF) in major world regions (Figure 5) show a significant difference in sustainability between developing
and industrialized countries. Africa’s economies appear to be non-sustainable because negative ECF indicates an overall disinvest-
ment in produced and natural capital. Industrialized countries and China, on the other hand, increased their capital base and met
thus one necessary condition for (weakly) sustaining their economies. Data in the same study indicate also that CO2 emission may
contribute about 8% to the global environmental accounting cost.
Past overall capital maintenance or increase hide the fact that in the long run complementarities of natural capital might make it
impossible to maintain production and consumption patterns and growth rates. The empirical testing of this assumption should be
an important part of sustainability research.
At the microeconomic level, one important use of environmental (social) cost accounting is to determine the level at which
market instruments should be set initially. Market (‘economic’) instruments such as eco-taxes prompt economic agents to
internalize environmental costs according to polluter/user-pays principles. The ultimate effects of environmental cost internaliza-
tion on production and consumption patterns and overall economic growth and employment need, of course, be modeled with
the usual simplifications and assumptions. The results of such modeling might point to the need of resetting the original levels of
market instruments to improve their efficacy.
Greened national accounts and physical input-output tables are a particularly useful tool for integrative environmental-
economic modeling since they generate a high degree of transparency with regard to the underlying data and indicators. They
can also improve the transparency and validity of the manifold energy scenarios (and related climate change models) that predict
or deny reaching the limits of energy supply and, possibly, economic growth.
However, greened national accounts can only capture the immediate interaction between environment and economy. A broader
assessment of sustainability would have to take account of social, institutional and political aspects of sustainable development. In the
field of energy, the disparities in the distribution of and access to scarce nonrenewable resources have triggered aggressive policies of
securing an affordable energy supply. Assessing natural resource availability, ownership, and trends of consumption in different
regions and nations could alert us to looming resource scarcities and to possible international conflicts in resource extraction and use.
It might also be the first step toward more rational policies of ensuring energy security, and perhaps security, for all.

Figure 5 ECF in world regions (percent of GDP). Positive ECF indicates weakly sustainable economies. Negative ECF shows non-sustainability because
the region consumed more produced and natural capital than it generated during an accounting period. Reprinted from Ecological Economics 68,
Figure 4, Bartelmus, P. (2009), The cost of natural capital consumption: accounting for a sustainable world economy, with permission from Elsevier.
 Green Accounting and Energy 13

Appendix. Monetary Valuation in the SEEA

Market valuation uses prices for natural assets that can be observed in markets. It is usually applied to economic assets of natural
resources. The SNA includes economic assets as ‘those assets which are subject to ownership rights and from which economic
benefits may be derived by their owners’ (European Commission et al., 2009, para. 2.34). Figure 4 displays therefore part of natural
capital consumption under the column of economic assets.
Where market prices for natural resource stocks, such as oil deposits or fish in the ocean, are not available, the economic value of
these assets can be derived from estimates of the – discounted – sum of life-long net returns obtained from their potential use in
production. It is at this value that a natural asset would be traded if a market existed for the asset. Market valuation techniques are
also applied to changes in asset values, caused in particular by depletion, i.e. their non-sustainable use. Losses in asset value
represent losses in the income-spinning capacity of an economic asset. Depletion cost allowances cater thus to a weak sustainability
concept, calling for the reinvestment of the allowances in any income-generating activity.
Maintenance valuation permits the costing of the degradation of non-economic environmental assets, in particular their
capacity of absorbing emissions. Typically, these externalities are not traded in markets. The original 1993 SEEA defined
maintenance cost as those ‘that would have been incurred if the environment had been used in such a way as not to have affected
its future use’. Maintenance costs refer to best-available technologies or production processes with which to avoid, mitigate, or
reduce environmental impacts. They are used to weight actual environmental impacts, generated during the accounting period.
As with depreciation allowances for the wear and tear of produced capital, such costing can be seen as the funds required for
reinvesting in capital maintenance.
The recently revised (2012) SEEA excludes, however, environmental degradation and its cost. If at all, their valuation might be
discussed in further experimental ecosystem accounts. As a result, economic indicators are adjusted only for the cost of natural
resource depletion. The revised SEEA does elaborate on the valuation principles of the SNA for economic natural resources in the
absence of market prices for resource stocks.
The 1993 SEEA discussed also contingent and related damage valuations. These valuations are applied in cost-benefit analyses
of particular projects and programs, but are hardly applicable at the national level. They refer to the ultimate welfare effects
(damages) of environmental impacts. Welfare effects are incompatible, however, with the market price and cost conventions of the
national accounts. The 1993 SEEA considered, therefore, damage valuation in environmental accounting as experimental, and its
operational manual discouraged its application.

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Further Reading
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http://unstats.un.org/unsd/envaccounting/White_cover.pdf.
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seeae/.
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