The State of Environmental-Economic Statistics: Puzzle Pieces Waiting to Be Assembled

Environmental changes and challenges, such as climate change and nature loss, are increasingly relevant to economic decisions. Evidence-based economic decisions require organized data. So, environmental data need to be organized in a way similar to, and connected with, existing economic data and statistics. Current approaches to environmental-economic statistics and data remain fragmented, despite a variety of efforts to unify them. We review environmental-economic concepts to provide a high-level framework for addressing the primary challenge of organizing existing environmental data within the economic statistical system. We connect environmental-economic statistics to a variety of use cases, focusing on uses aside from benefit-cost analysis and sustainability assessment. We then review and assess the state of existing efforts to organize environmental-economic data and statistics. We conclude with a discussion of emerging tools that can enable a next-generation approach to environmental-economic statistics and ideas about how to accelerate the process or organizing and integrating environmental data into economic statistics.