Water accounts refer to a recently created discipline, which seeks to provide relevant information for the design and evaluation of water policies. Based on the experience of more than fifty years in national accounts, the discipline that provides the elements to calculate the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the Statistics Division of the UN developed the System of Economic Environmental Accounts of Water (SEEA-W or SEEA-Water, for its acronym in English), which has been adopted as a provisional statistical standard in 2007. The "SEEA-Water" is a conceptual framework for organizing the physical and economic information related to water, using concepts, definitions and classifications consistent with those of the System of National Accounts (SNA). The "SEEA-Water" is a particularization of the manual for the Integrated Economic-Environmental Accounts 2003 (SEEA 2003), which describes the interactions between the economy and the environment and covers a whole range of natural resources and the environment. To support the implementation of the "SEEA-Water", the UN Statistics Division developed the International Recommendations for the Integration of Water Statistics (IRWS), which has also been approved as standard.

Today more than 50 countries around the world have implemented, or plan to implement, water accounts.

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