Ethiopia NCA Initiative:
 Technical workshop on Natural Capital Accounting and Investment Prioritization Tool for Sustainable Land Management 

 
The World Bank and United Nations Statistics Division conducted a follow-up in-person technical training last month for Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) focal points, contact persons as well as data custodians in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The training is part of the Ethiopian NCA initiative which aims is to help institutionalize NCA approaches in decision making by helping government agencies to acquire, maintain and update data and information on natural capital. 
 
The technical training aimed to advance the development of land and ecosystem services accounts and ecosystem-based prioritization tools. The technical training workshop enhanced the institutional knowledge and capacity of the technical training participants as well as provided the way forward for the account development and investment prioritization tools development. 
 
The Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) initiative in Ethiopia is one of the programs of Ethiopia’s Resilient and Green Development Advisory Services and Analytics (ASA) under the Environment, Natural Resources & Blue Economy program of the World Bank. 
 
This initiative aims to build a robust information system for natural capital to inform national priorities and policies including the Climate Resilient Green Economy agenda, implementation of a ten-year development plan and Ethiopia’s updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) and World Bank-supported landscape management projects.
 
Speaking at the training, Ross Hughes, World Bank Senior Natural Resource Management Specialist said: " This technical workshop will enhance understanding of the NCA technical framework; the data and institutional assessment that has been conducted to support the compilation of data for account development; and ecosystem services modeling and investment prioritization approaches for Sustainable Land Management (SLM) and Natural Resources Management thereby to inform the on-going preparation of the Ethiopia SLM Strategic Investment Framework (ESIF)"