3. ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES STATISTICS/ACCOUNTING
3.1. The Objectives
a. Environment and Natural Resources Statistics
The aim to compile environment and natural resources statistics is to provide information about the state and change of state of the resource in certain period. This statistics will describe the availability of natural resources (quantity and quality), human activities, and natural events that affect the environment, the impacts of these activities and event, and social responses to these impacts. The components of the environment and natural resources statistics consists of those assets as shown in Table 1.
Human activities, in one side, use natural resources and related activities to produce goods and services to meet their human needs and on the other side they also produce environmental impact through the direct use or misuse of natural resources, and through the generation of waste and emission in economic activities. Natural events are also included in the compilation of this statistics because human activities also frequently contribute to natural disasters and because natural events may have impacts on all environment components.
Under the category of the environmental impacts the statistics will record the changes of natural resources due to the depletion and discovery of the resources, changes the environmental quality and their impact on human health, etc. Responses to environmental impacts are intended to provide information about the resource management and rehabilitation, monitoring and control of pollutants and prevention of environmental damage. Further, the stocks and inventories will provide information about the state of natural resources at the point of time (Table 2).
Environmental statistics has provided data base concerning the state of environment and natural resources. It has assisted us to identify variably for statistical description, to review environmental problems and concerns, to assess data requirements, to identify the producer's data as a source of data, etc.
