From Accounts to Policy : WAVES Closeout Report - Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services Global Partnership (2012-2019) (English)

Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES) is a USD23 million World Bank-led global partnership aimed at mainstreaming natural capital in development decisions by better measuring it, valuing it, and integrating it into national economic accounts. The goal of this report is to summarize the main results that the program has achieved at the national and global levels, from its inception in 2012 to its 2019 completion, and to assess the significance of those results across four dimensions: data and information, tools and capacities, institutions, and decision making. The principal audience of the report is the many WAVES partners-notably donors-who contributed to the program and authorities in participating countries who established country teams to develop and use natural capital accounting (NCA) (finance, development, statistics, environment, sector authorities) but also the broader development community active in this space. The report finds that WAVES has supported development of 32 natural capital accounts. These accounts contributed to the monitoring of 11 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and helped establish 10 country solutions to institutionalize NCA, and informed 52 decisions across the different stages of the policy-making cycle (design, implementation, monitoring, reform). WAVES also contributed to results that World Bank Group (WBG) operations achieved. Outputs such as data sets, valuations, advice, and analytics produced under the program became useful to WBG operations and informed their design. In countries such as Colombia, Guatemala, and Rwanda, WAVES funding of USD4.5 million has informed the design of World Bank lending operations worth USD1.1 billion, for a leveraging ratio of more than 1 to 240. WAVES did not finance preparation of any WBG operations, and the contribution is thus indirect. It is measured by the leverage ratio (the ratio between financing amount of WBG informed and the cost of WAVES support). An indirect contribution was also made to national policy reforms as measured by the number of reforms informed.