Mobilizing knowledge management to formalize the ontology of ecological planning’s information system through comprehensive accounting in respect of ecology, ecosystem-centered accounting, and unpaid ecological costs frameworks

Socio-environmental accounting methods are increasingly applied to, and experimented by private and public sector organisations. Meanwhile, there has been a profusion of these methods. This poses internal challenges in terms of resources, clarity on the objectives and methods of SEAs, redundancy, compatibility and interference with other mandatory reporting obligations; mixing of action plans, indicators. Indeed, the existing regulatory and voluntary environmental reporting initiatives are numerous, but disjointed. In this paper, we adopt an information systems and knowledge engineering perspective to show how this can be described as a data stovepiping. Stovepiping is the result of the lack of interoperability of SEA frameworks, as organizations and their information systems aren't designed to systematically preserve natural entities. This raises further questions, regarding semantic and syntactic issues, which stem from ontological issues, from both an information system and philosophical perspectives. Then, we investigate what the implications of ontological formalization are for interoperability and effective data as well as knowledge processing, rather than stovepiping. The starting point of our is a case study in which we describe how the attempt to apply ecological accounting CARE led us to build the premises for an inference engine – an algorithm of simulation of deductive reasoning. We then describe how the application of ecological accounting method Comprehensive Accounting in Respect of Ecology C.A.R.E. constitutes a way to classify and process disjointed environmental information, as a way to make sense out of it and allow for proper, effective and systematic preservational environmental management in organizations. Hereby, we situate this inference engine as a way to makes sense of the data lake formed by scattered environmental informations. We discuss its characteristics. This inference engine can be formalized to constitute an expert system, which we outline. Then, we put into perspective the notion of planning. Analysing economic planning and its modalities across countries, we show how planning has relied on an articulation between different levels of accounting, requiring harmonization of accounting information systems for statistics, which we link to data pipelines and interoperability. We draw an analogy with ecological planning, to show how C.A.R.E., along with Ecosystem-Centered Accounting and Unpaid Ecological Costs models, constitute ecological planning's information system. The application process of this information system constitutes a systematic process of gap-showing and filling with regards to the current ecological planning process (or lack thereof). It provides a way to answer the challenge of scattered environmental information under existing frameworks and SEA methods, which reconciles and redistributes public and private action whilst instituting an ecological preservation finality.