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.
The consultation closes Friday 13 November 2026 — 23:59 GMT on Friday 13 November 2026. If your response needs institutional clearance, allow for that in your timetable, and send comments as you go rather than saving them for one submission at the end. How to comment sets out the mechanics.
What the Technical Guidance is
Section titled “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 89 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
Section titled “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
Section titled “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
Section titled “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. How to comment sets out the comment types and severities the form asks you to pick from.
What is and is not settled
Section titled “What is and is not settled”Each circular carries an editorial label:
- Draft — substantially written, published for reading, and still under review by the GOAP Secretariat. Most circulars are here.
- Completed — it has cleared Secretariat review. Comments on it are treated as input to the next revision cycle rather than to first publication.
- Forthcoming (Planned in the circular’s own status field) — the number and title are settled but the text is not released yet, so there is no page and no comment form. A comment on scope is still useful; email it in.
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 — Core, Applied, Emerging, or Pilot — is the honest signal of how much weight a method can bear today.
How comments are handled
Section titled “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: triage, redraft, director review, and Secretariat review before publication. We cannot promise a reply to every comment; write to info@oceanaccounts.org if you need an answer.
How to comment is the respondent-facing page: the mechanics of the form, the full cycle set out in a diagram, what we record and what we publish, and how contributors are named. Anonymous submission is supported and carries no penalty in triage.
How to cite
Section titled “How to cite”Cite the consultation edition, not an adopted standard, and always give the version and the date you accessed it: circulars are revised during the consultation, and every version stays available at its own address.
Everything on this site is cited to the GOAP Secretariat as author, whether you are citing one circular or the publication as a whole. Individual contributors are not cited: they are acknowledged in Circular 0.3: Acknowledgements.
A single circular — author, year, title, series and circular number, version, publisher, and the URL with an access date:
Global Ocean Accounts Partnership Secretariat (2026) Navigating the Technical Guidance (GOAP Technical Guidance on Ocean Accounting, TG-0.5, v0.11.0). GOAP Secretariat. Available at: https://guidance.oceanaccounts.org/circulars/section-0/0-5-navigating/ (Accessed: 2 September 2026).
In text: (Global Ocean Accounts Partnership Secretariat, 2026) or GOAP Secretariat (2026). Where you cite more than one circular from the same year, distinguish them by circular number rather than by a letter suffix: (GOAP Secretariat, 2026, TG-0.5).
The publication as a whole, where a specific circular is not what is being referred to:
Global Ocean Accounts Partnership Secretariat (2026) Technical Guidance on Ocean Accounting: global consultation edition. GOAP Secretariat. Available at: https://guidance.oceanaccounts.org/ (Accessed: 2 September 2026).
A few points that matter for this publication:
- Version, not just year.
v0.11.0andv0.12.0of the same circular may differ substantively. Every version is served at its own URL —/circulars/section-0/0-5-navigating/v0.11.0/— so cite that address if the exact text matters. - Access date. Required for anything cited from this site while the consultation is open.
- Status. If the distinction is material to your argument, say so in text: “TG-0.5 (Draft for consultation)”. Nothing here is adopted GOAP guidance.
- Place of publication is omitted, as Harvard permits for online reports. If your style guide requires one, use Sydney, where the GOAP Secretariat is hosted.
Each circular page carries its own ready-made citation and a BibTeX entry under Cite this circular, with that circular’s number, version, and date already filled in.
Licence
Section titled “Licence”You may copy, translate, adapt and republish anything on this site, including the figures, as long as you credit the Global Ocean Accounts Partnership and do not use it commercially. Consultation drafts and downloadable figures are © Global Ocean Accounts Partnership and released under CC BY-NC 4.0. Figures you download already carry GOAP’s credit inside the file.
About GOAP
Section titled “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.