The bird was bulldozed and confused. Comes with high resolution JPEG, AI CS2, and AI8 EPS files. | Photo Credit: Amathers
GDP gave us a rocket ship. But we are flying blind.
We were sold the story: progress is always up to the right. GDP is proof. Growth means success. When the number goes up, everyone wins. But what if the story breaks?
This week, a new report from Verisk MapleCroft has price tagged climate risks to corporate assets of $1.14 trillion for just five years. India, Nigeria, Kenya, Bangladesh, Pakistan: All Bullseye. India alone has a S&P 500 exposure of $818 billion. That’s not a matter of the future. That’s all for now. Growth is roaring. However, the ground below it is cracked. Here’s what GDP is: It was built in the 1930s with the abbreviations of labor and machinery rather than nature. The goal at the time? Reboot the economy. GDP did the job. But it doesn’t look at the world we live in now. Will you burn the forest? GDP will rise. Do you bleach the reef? GDP will rise. Sea fish? Still up. The ecosystem is not counted. Biodiversity is not counted. Carbon sinks, flood buffers, disease regulators – none of them appear. If it is alive and not purchased, GDP ignores it.
We measure progress by what we produce and ignore what we destroy. And I wonder why we feel like we’re moving forward and falling apart at the same time. The progress is not linear. It’s a hassle. We acquire technology and lose stability. We live longer and feel sick. Numbers tell a story. The planet tells something else. So why stick to GDP? Because it rewards extraction. Because it’s convenient. Because it works – for those who have already won.
As Yuval Harari says, humans are good at solving short-term problems. It does not collapse slowly. GDP keeps the short-term machine humming and the long-term system buckles.
Yes, people will roll their eyes.
“Ah, green GDP? A metric of happiness? I tried it. I didn’t stick.”
truth. It’s work in progress. This does not mean we will be stopped. That means we try harder. I have more imagination.
Because the first principle is simple. The purpose of the economy is to help people survive and thrive. If it doesn’t take into account the ecosystems we depend on, it’s not helping us to thrive. It’s helping us crash. If nature doesn’t look like money, it remains unseemly a decision. But here’s the shift. People are beginning to rewrite stories.
The New Zealand Health Budget tracks not only growth, but ecological and social health. The UN SEEA framework helps explain nature as a country does its capital. Today, more than 70 countries are increasing the prices of carbon. The EU is testing biodiversity credits. The UK’s Dasgupta review said that nature should have revealed that it is an asset. These are not hypotheses. They are data points for new stories. This is where survival is more important than output. India can’t afford to miss this turn. That growth is real. The same goes for that risk. There is no need to scrap GDP. Stop treating it like the gospel. Build parallel metrics. Track biodiversity. Tax destruction. Repairing rewards. If you don’t measure what’s important, you lose what’s important. And when we realize it, it will be too late. Old stories took us here. It doesn’t put us out. Time to write better things.
The author is co-founder of Soul Forest and Keaty (Earth Shot Award winner)
Released on May 11, 2025
