On July 4th, I participated in a workshop on ocean accounting in Hong Kong, hosted by WWF-HK. This workshop was to share some preliminary findings of assessment of ecosystem service in the Greater Bay Area, as well as to listen to Hong Kong conservationists’ opinions on it.
I introduced the two different terms in ocean accounting, stock accounting and flow accounting. The former is the asset value of ocean, like the savings people have in ocean, while the latter is annual ecosystem service production, like the interest people receive from the ocean every year.
The audience were quite active in asking questions and expressing opinions. We discussed on how such accounting can be used in conservation in Hong Kong. As far as I understand from the workshop, Hong Kong government has been collecting high-resolution satellite images and these could be perfectly used for ecosystem service evaluation. However, there are still gaps before high-quality evaluation can be done, including the lack of momentum, the pressure on future comparisons between calculations, the additional funding in implementing such calculations.
We have been studying such accounting in GBA and expect to finish within this year. We hope to demonstrate the methodology and explore further questions that this could answer.