Epilogue - Thanatia: The Destiny of the Earth's Mineral Resources - page 514

Accounting knowledge leaves the doors open for a global management of natural
resources. Such knowledge could induce efforts to pay off some of the debt owed
to future generations, even though much of it will remain, because as Ásgeirsdóttir
(2004) stated:
“The luxuries of one generation are often the needs of the next:::and, we need to
achieve more sustainable consumption and production patterns, to increasingly
decouple environmental pressure from economic growth, to ensure sustainable
management of natural resources and to work together in partnership to reduce
poverty.”
17.5.1 From SEEA to a global system of environmental-thermo-
economic accounts
If replacement can be calculated and registered for almost any of Man's actions, an
international framework to provide concepts, definitions, classifications, accounting
rules and standard tables for all countries could be built. The UN's System of
Environmental-Economic Accounts (SEEA) may well provide such a framework.
As previously explained in Sec. 2.5.1, the System of National Accounts (SNA) is
an established system for producing internationally comparable economic statistics
which imposes organisation and standardisation of domestic accounts. It is widely
accepted and established worldwide. Companies and countries report economic and
physical data following the established accounting procedure and BSOs (Bureaus of
Statistical O ce) integrate them. It is a huge infrastructure. From households to
companies and to countries, these accounts are presented in monetary values with
the SEEA following the accounting structure of the SNA which thus facilitates the
integration of environmental statistics with economic accounts. Each national BSO
needs to take responsibility for the environmental data recovery and environmental-
economic accounting practice.
The reader has seen that for constructing the physical tables needed for SEEA,
the information recovered is rather poor since simply registering material tonnage
is not sensitive enough for qualifying most of the physical phenomena. The ag-
gregation level of accounting determines the yardstick to be used in the accounts.
Monetisation runs well from households to companies. However money is not a good
unit either - at national level it has proved insu cient for economic-environmental
accounts whilst at the aggregated global level accounts, money losses weight in
favour of physical accounts. Actually, for the proper viewing of the planet's evolu-
tion, monetary accounting is not only insu cient but inappropriate.
Thus whilst the SEEA is a good starting point, it should be in the authors' opin-
ion further developed into a Global System of Environmental-Thermo-Economic
Accounts (SETEA), where exergy replacement costs are embedded in the SEEA
framework. In the same way that the System for National Accounts has smoothly
evolved into the SEEA, someday it would be possible to have complementary ac-
counts for natural resources replacement costs into the framework of SEEA. Future