About this consultation
This site is the global consultation edition of the Technical Guidance on Ocean Accounting, published by the Global Ocean Accounts Partnership (GOAP). Everything on it is a draft released for review. This page explains what the guidance is, why it is being consulted on, and what the consultation is actually asking of you.
What the Technical Guidance is
Ocean accounts organise environmental, economic, and social data about marine and coastal systems into one structured picture, using the same accounting logic that national statistical offices already apply to the economy. The purpose is to let governments see the trade-offs behind ocean policy: what the ocean economy produces, who gains and who loses from ocean development, and whether the underlying asset base is being maintained or run down.
The Technical Guidance is the operational layer above the international standards. It does not create a new statistical framework. It interprets adopted standards — the 2025 System of National Accounts (SNA), the SEEA Central Framework, and SEEA Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA) — for the ocean context, and sets out how to actually compile the resulting accounts with the data a country is likely to have. Where a method goes beyond what the standards settle, the guidance says so rather than presenting it as agreed.
Three properties matter for reviewing it:
- Modular. The guidance is 85 circulars across seven sections, not a single monograph. Each circular is self-contained, states its own prerequisites, and can be read and implemented without the rest.
- Graded by maturity. Every circular carries a stability badge — Core, Applied, Emerging, or Pilot — so a compiler can see how settled a method is before building a national statistic on it.
- Task-first. Circulars are written to be used by whoever has to produce the numbers, not read cover to cover. Circular 0.5: Navigating the Technical Guidance sets out reading pathways by role.
The full set is listed in Technical Guidance Circulars; Find the right circular filters it by theme, audience, and workflow stage.
Who it is for
The guidance is written for the people who have to produce, quality-assure, or act on ocean accounts:
| Reader | What they need from the guidance |
|---|---|
| National statisticians and account compilers | Compilation methods, classifications, and quality assurance that hold up in an official statistical process |
| Marine scientists and ecosystem analysts | How ecological measurement feeds extent, condition, and services accounts |
| Ministry policy and planning staff | How accounts enter budget submissions, marine spatial planning, and national planning |
| Finance and investment practitioners | How account outputs support project finance, blue finance, and private-sector disclosure |
| MEA and treaty reporting staff | How accounts generate the indicators that reporting obligations ask for |
Why it is being consulted on
Guidance of this kind is only credible if the people expected to apply it have had a chance to say where it fails. Ocean accounting is compiled under widely varying conditions — different data availability, institutional mandates, legal boundaries, and ecosystem types — and no drafting team can anticipate all of them from the inside.
This follows established practice for statistical standards and their guidance. The 2025 SNA update ran 61 consultations drawing more than 2,600 responses from 180 countries and 15 international organisations before the UN Statistical Commission recommended it. SEEA Ecosystem Accounting was consulted twice — chapter by chapter through the first half of 2020, then as a complete draft that closed on 30 November 2020 — with comments from national statistical offices in more than 40 countries, international organisations, and independent experts published openly on the consultation site. In both cases the substance of the final text was shaped by what reviewers said was unworkable.
The GOAP consultation applies the same principle at a finer grain. Because the guidance is modular, comments can be anchored to a single paragraph, table, or figure rather than to a whole chapter, and reviewers can engage only with the circulars relevant to their work.
What the consultation is asking for
The most useful comment is a specific, practical one. In order of value to the editorial process:
- A step you could not follow. A compilation instruction that is ambiguous, circular, or missing an input.
- A data source you do not have. A method that assumes data your jurisdiction cannot obtain, with a note on what you do have instead.
- A method that will not survive your national context. A treatment that conflicts with your legal boundaries, institutional mandates, or existing statistical practice.
- A factual or methodological error. Including misalignment with the SNA, SEEA CF, or SEEA EA, ideally with the paragraph reference.
- An omission. Something a reader in your role would need that no circular covers.
- Confirmation that something works. Support is useful evidence too, particularly where a method has been contested internally.
General endorsement or general disapproval of the guidance as a whole is the least actionable form of input. Paragraph-level comment on a specific method is the most.
What is and is not settled
Most circulars are Draft: substantially written, published for reading, and still under review by the GOAP Technical Expert Panel. Planned circulars have defined scope but little or no body text yet — a comment on scope is still useful there. Completed circulars have cleared panel review, and comments on them are treated as input to the next revision cycle rather than to first publication.
Nothing on this site is an adopted GOAP standard, and circulars here should not be cited as adopted guidance. The stability badge on each circular is the honest signal of how much weight a method can bear today.
How comments are handled
Comments are triaged by type and severity, attributed to the circular and passage they were made against, and worked through the circular review cycle: expert-loop triage, redraft, director review, and Technical Expert Panel review before publication. Comment text may be published or summarised in the consultation record. Your name, email, and organisation are not published — they are used only to reply to you and to recognise repeat submitters during triage. Anonymous submission is supported and carries no penalty in triage.
The mechanics of commenting, and the full detail of what is and is not published, are on How to comment.
Licence
Consultation drafts and downloadable figures on this site are © Global Ocean Accounts Partnership and released under CC BY-NC 4.0 — share and adapt with attribution to GOAP, non-commercial use only. Downloaded figures carry GOAP attribution in their file metadata.
About GOAP
The Global Ocean Accounts Partnership works towards globally recognised, standardised guidance for ocean accounting, and aims to support at least 30 countries by 2030 in building complete sequences of national ocean accounts. Members gain access to GOAP Fellows and international methodological expertise, a library of technical guidance and case studies, and regional Communities of Practice.
The GOAP Secretariat is hosted by the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Partnership activities are funded by the United Kingdom Blue Planet Fund, the World Bank Blue Economy Program, Australia’s Oceans Leadership Package, and the Australia–India Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative Partnership. Contributors to the guidance are credited in Circular 0.3: Acknowledgements.
For more about the Partnership, visit oceanaccounts.org. For enquiries, contact info@oceanaccounts.org.