Office of Management and Budget
AGENCY:
Office of Management and Budget.
ACTION:
Request for Information (RFI).
SUMMARY:
The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB)—on behalf of the co-chairs of the Interagency Policy Working Group on Statistics for Environmental-Economic Decisions (Working Group), the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and Department of Commerce (DOC)—requests information and comments on questions posed by the Working Group to help inform the development of Government-wide natural capital accounts and standardized environmental-economic statistics. The Working Group has developed a draft Strategic Plan that recommends short- and long-term strategic goals, as well as objectives and proposed strategies to achieve a routinely produced set of Government-wide natural capital accounts and standardized environmental-economic statistics that complement and operate in alignment with core national economic accounts and statistics. To support the Strategic Plan, OMB seeks information on likely and potential applications for U.S. natural capital accounts, established statistics and accounts that would strengthen the U.S. system, relevant external factors that may affect implementation of the Strategic Plan, and relevant ancillary or indirect consequences of developing natural capital accounts or associated statistics.
DATES:
Interested persons and organizations are invited to submit comments by October 21, 2022.
ADDRESSES:
Submit comments through www.regulations.gov —a Federal E-Government website that allows the public to find, review, and submit comments on documents that agencies ( printed page 51451) have published in the Federal Register and that are open for comment. Enter “OMB-2022-0009” (in quotes) in the search box and follow the instructions for submitting comments. Please include the Docket ID (OMB-2022-0009) and the phrase “RFI-Natural Capital” at the beginning of your comments. Please also indicate which questions from the INFORMATION REQUESTED section of this notice is addressed in your comments.
Comments submitted in response to this notice may be made available to the public and subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. For this reason, please do not include in your comments information of a confidential nature, such as sensitive personal information or proprietary information. If you send an email comment, your email address will be automatically captured and included as part of the comment that is placed in the public docket; however, www.regulations.gov does include the option of commenting anonymously. Please note that responses to this public comment request containing any routine notice about the confidentiality of the communication will be treated as public comments that may be made available to the public notwithstanding the inclusion of the routine notice.
Electronic Availability:Federal Register notices are available electronically at www.federalregister.gov/. The draft Strategic Plan is available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Natural-Capital-Accounting-Strategy.pdf.
Public Review Procedure: All comments and proposals received in response to this notice will be available for public inspection.
Instructions
Response to this RFI is voluntary. Each responding entity (individual or organization) is requested to submit only one response. OMB welcomes any responses to inform and guide the work of OMB and the Working Group. Please feel free to respond to one or as many prompts as you choose. Submission should use 12-point or larger font, with a page number provided on each page. Respondents are encouraged, though not required, to include the name of the person(s) or organization(s) filing the comment; the respondent type ( e.g., academic, advocacy, professional society, community-based organization, industry, trainee/student, member of the public, government, other); and the respondent's role in the organization ( e.g., researcher, faculty, student, program manager, journalist). For comments containing references, studies, research, and other empirical data that are not widely published, respondents are encouraged to include copies or electronic links of the referenced materials, in a machine-readable format to the degree possible. No business proprietary information, copyrighted information, or sensitive personally identifiable information should be submitted in response to this RFI. Please be aware that comments submitted in response to this RFI may be released publicly.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:
For additional information, contact: Andrew Stawasz, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Office of Management and Budget, New Executive Office Building, Washington, DC 20503, Email: NaturalCapitalAccounting@omb.eop.gov, Telephone: (202) 881-7051.