Earth Observation (EO) biomass and carbon datasets are increasing and their potential as inputs to the environmental-economic accounting framework based on SEEA was assessed in this study toward accounting for all carbon pools: above-ground, below-ground, deadwood, litter and soil carbon. This demonstration allowed the compilation of carbon accounts in four accounting periods 2010-2017, 2017-2018, 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 for six case countries namely Brazil, Mozambique, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Sweden and USA, and later on compared with the accounts from a counterpart carbon accounting framework based on UNFCCC. The compiled carbon accounts revealed the above-ground component being the dominant carbon pool in Brazil and the Philippines, while soil organic carbon outweighs other carbon pools in the Netherlands, Sweden and surprisingly Mozambique. We found decreasing carbon stocks especially for Brazil even in shorter accounting periods i.e., 2018-2019 captured by the EO dataset. This is in contrast to what has been reported by countries to UNFCCC mostly reporting stability in the carbon flows over the years. Part of the discrepancy is the country definitions of managed forests which can be inconsistent with forest management datasets from EO (this study). Another reason is the dependency of countries on national forest inventories which are rarely updated on an annual basis. Moreover, our compiled accounts showed minimal carbon emissions from forest degradation mainly driven by the choice of ecosystem extent input, and lower soil carbon emissions than UNFCCC reports, potentially underestimating peatland emissions. The findings and outputs from this demonstration echo the potential of EO datasets for carbon accounting especially with the advent of time series biomass data, higher spatial resolution of ecosystem extent maps 5-10 m and online ecosystem accounting tools for efficient use cases.
