Adding an aggregate sustainability gap metric to ocean accounting: a Blue ESGAP application in South-East Asia

In response to defined Sustainable Development Goals and planetary boundaries, environmental policymakers need to monitor the state of the environment to evaluate the effectiveness of their actions and to prioritize policies. In the case of ocean sustainability, there is a rapidly moving research and political agenda on the development of ocean accounts, with the adoption of the System of Environmental Economic Accounting – Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA-EA) and the structuring of the ocean accounting community around the Global Ocean Accounting Partnership. The Environmental Sustainability Gap (ESGAP) framework is being developed to provide a reporting system at the national level aligned with strong sustainability principles that allows an operational dialogue between science and public policies. It is intended to complement current ocean accounting initiatives by introducing a synthetic dashboard of state indicators from a strong sustainability perspective, adopting strict criteria on the maintenance of critical natural capital. This work focuses on implementing and extending the ESGAP framework to include other dimensions related to ocean sustainability in two case-studies in South-East Asia: Indonesia and the Philippines. There is a mismatch between the scale at which decision-making takes place and the scale at which ecological processes underlying critical natural capital occur, which parallels a tension between scientific and political definitions of ocean sustainability objectives. There is uneven availability of information on the four environmental functions that compose the ESGAP, i.e., source, sink, life-support and human health and welfare. The Blue ESGAP provides another perspective on ocean sustainability in both countries. It also identifies gaps in ocean monitoring and the need to define targets, as well as the cost of reaching them, which aims to inform ocean management and policies. This preliminary work is an important building block to start conversations on defining shared values of a sustainable ocean and monitor the gap to reach these targets.