Sri Lanka’s economy can post growth while its natural resource base is being depleted, the country’s chief statistician said this week, outlining plans to build a parallel set of accounts that would track what conventional national accounts leave out.
U.V. Jayakody, Director General of the Department of Census and Statistics, was speaking at a workshop organised by the Centre for Poverty Analysis with support from the Asian Development Bank.
“Consequently, the country may experience economic growth while its natural wealth is gradually declining,” Jayakody said.
The measurement gap
The argument turns on an asymmetry in how national accounts treat natural resources. Jayakody used timber as the illustration: when timber is harvested, its value is counted as economic output — but the corresponding depletion of the forest is only partially reflected in the statistics. Growth is recorded; the drawdown of the asset that produced it is not fully captured.
“We need to understand not only how fast our economy is growing today, but also whether we are preserving the natural resources that will sustain that growth in the future,” he said.
What natural capital accounts would do
The proposed accounts would record changes in both the availability and the condition of natural resources, and measure the ecosystem services those resources provide. Two areas are earmarked for the initial phase:
- Upper watersheds
- Coastal and marine ecosystems
The accounts would be used to assess what these systems contribute to water supplies, agriculture, hydropower, fisheries, tourism and coastal protection — sectors whose output already appears in GDP but whose dependence on the underlying natural assets does not.
The work sits under a United Nations framework that combines environmental and economic data on a common basis. Jayakody indicated that physical measures of the condition of natural assets would be prioritised alongside monetary estimates, rather than everything being reduced to a single value.
An institutional change as well
The initiative is embedded in the department’s 2026–2030 statistics strategy, which envisages transforming the Department of Census and Statistics into a National Statistics Office. Producing the accounts would require sustained coordination with the Forest Department, the Central Environmental Authority and the Survey Department, since the underlying physical data sits with those agencies rather than with the statisticians.
Not reported
The filing gives no timeline for a first published set of accounts, no budget or funding commitment beyond ADB support for the workshop itself, and no estimate of the scale of natural capital depletion to date. It does not say whether the accounts would be published alongside GDP or separately, nor whether the National Statistics Office conversion requires legislation. No other official is quoted. Daily Mirror’s account carries no reporter byline.
