Interest around Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) continues to grow with more affluent countries investing in developing accounts. The environment and natural resources global practice at the World Bank is providing technical assistance on NCA to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as part of a reimbursable advisory services support to the General Authority for Meteorology and Environmental Protection (GAMEP) under the Technical Cooperation Program between the World Bank and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

A World Bank team conducted a mission to Jeddah to participate in a three-day workshop from February 18-20, 2019 that was hosted by GAMEP. The workshop aimed to introduce the concept of NCA and develop practical understanding of NCA by providing examples of relevant accounts from across the world. The workshop saw wide participation from different government agencies and academia and benefited from presentations from GAMEP on KSA’s sustainability initiatives to achieve KSA Vision 2030, and General Authority for Statistics (GSTAT) on their preliminary work on water accounts.  

In a press release, Dr. Nayef Al Shalhoub, Director of Environmental Economics Department at the GAMEP, explained that the workshop is an effort to strengthen national efforts by using the best international standards to work on natural capital accounting. This work on NCA would help integrate country's environmental, economic, commercial, and health considerations. He stressed that this collaboration would help train GAMEP staff and build their practical and technical capacity.