Earth System Science Partnership, Paris
28-Mar-2012
Brazil and India pay a high price for rapid economic growth, according to experts speaking at a major international meeting in London, Planet Under Pressure.
Between 1990 and 2008, the wealth of these two countries as measured by GDP per capita rose 34% and 120% respectively. But a myopic focus on economic capital is flawed, scientists and economists at the conference argue. Natural capital, the sum of a country’s assets, from forests to fossil fuels and minerals, declined 46% in Brazil and 31% in India, according to a new “Inclusive Wealth Indicator” designed to augment GDP as a measure of economic progress.
When measures of natural, human and manufactured capital are considered together to obtain a more comprehensive value, Brazil’s “Inclusive Wealth” rose just 3% and India’s rose 9% over that time.
“The work on Brazil and India illustrates why Gross Domestic Product is inadequate and misleading as an index of economic progress from a long-term perspective,” says Professor Anantha Duraiappah, Executive Director of UNU-IHDP.
“A country could completely exhaust all its natural resources while posting positive GDP growth. We need an indicator that estimates the wealth of nations – natural, human and manufactured and ideally even the social and ecological constituents of human well-being.”
The first Inclusive Wealth Report, to debut in full at a joint UNU-IHDP and United Nations Environment Programme event at June’s UN “Rio+20” summit in Brazil, will describe the “inclusive wealth” of 20 nations: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Ecuador, France, Germany, India, Japan, Kenya, Nigeria, Norway, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, USA, United Kingdom and Venezuela. The 20 nations featured in the report represent 72% of world GDP and 56% of global population.
Authored by 17 specialists from the UK, USA, Chile, Malaysia, India, Germany and Australia, the Inclusive Wealth Indicator is undertaken by UNU-IHDP with UNEP support and in collaboration with the UN-Water Decade Programme on Capacity Development (UNW-DPC) and the Natural Capital Project of Stanford University.
News release in full, click here
Example coverage, by Reuters, click here
Coverage summary, click here
Additional coverage of the Planet Under Pressure conference by the New York Times, 1) here, 2) here, 3) here