India's 2026-30 Environmental Accounts Roadmap: Tracking Forests, Water, Minerals, Carbon Stocks and More

India's statistics ministry, MoSPI, has set a 2026-2030 strategy to strengthen how the country tracks natural resources in economic terms. The roadmap builds on earlier work with environmental accounts and aims to improve time series, state-level data, and common definitions for areas like forests, water, minerals, carbon stocks, biodiversity, and pollination services. It follows the international SEEA framework and links natural resource data with standard economic statistics, though it stops short of introducing a new green GDP measure. A key practical point is the focus on state participation. Eighteen states and union territories had already formed interdepartmental groups on environmental accounting, which matters because water, land, and forest conditions vary sharply across India. The strategy also calls for using remote sensing more systematically and for connecting environmental accounts to government spending decisions. For anyone following carbon markets or climate policy, this kind of baseline data is worth watching, since reliable resource accounts could support future project baselines and policy decisions.