Recent international efforts directed at incorporating resources and pollution into traditional National Accounting have resulted in satellite accounts in physical units. These accounts are governed by the UN’s System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA, https://seea.un.org).
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has published some physical accounts on minerals, energy, greenhouse gases, fish stocks, and water use. These accounts deal mostly with the supply-side (that is producer’s) breakdown of physical resource use. Each account item represents the resource use of industries.
ISA has collaborated with many statistical agencies, for example the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Defra UK, in order to calculate physical National Accounts from a demand-side (consumer’s) perspective. These accounts represent the resource use for commodities consumed by final consumers such as households, the government, and foreign consumers. Demand-side accounts contain contributions by all industries in the entire upstream supply chain of each commodity.
In 2007, Defra UK has commissioned ISA and the Stockholm Environment Institute to calculate a time series of UK input-output accounts at great industry sector detail, and to derive from these accounts embedded carbon emissions and the UK’s carbon footprint.
Another example is a National Ecological Footprint Account for Australia calculated at the University of Sydney, which is given below. This type of National Account can be calculated for a large range of physical indicators, such as employment, land use, water use and others.