What if we measured what we regenerate?
I've been interested for some time in the question of how we measure economic success, and whether the pursuit of continual growth tells us very much about the things that actually matter. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measures the value of goods and services produced, but it doesn't distinguish particularly well between activity that creates lasting prosperity and activity that depletes the systems on which prosperity depends. Clearing a forest, extracting resources or rebuilding after environmental damage can all contribute to GDP. The damage itself doesn't appear as a corresponding subtraction.
Tenzin Seldon is proposing an alternative perspective through a framework called Gross Domestic Regeneration (GDR). Seldon grew up in the foothills of the Himalayas, where she witnessed a glacier melting and eventually flooding a field near her home. After moving to the United States as a teenager, she went on to study at Stanford University and Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, worked on regional disaster risk policy at the United Nations Environment Programme in Thailand, and later established Pulse Fund, an investment fund supporting climate-related businesses.
GDR asks a different question from GDP: not simply what has an economy produced, but what has it left stronger? Its three dimensions are ecological regeneration (the condition of land, water and natural systems), social regeneration (the health and resilience of communities) and capital regeneration (whether investment builds lasting capacity or extracts value). The model combines these dimensions rather than allowing strength in one to compensate for serious weakness in another.
It is still a developing framework, not an established replacement for GDP. There are important questions about how regeneration is measured, who decides which indicators matter and how social and ecological values can be represented without reducing everything to another financial calculation.
Nevertheless, I find the underlying proposition compelling. An economy that increases production while exhausting its soils, degrading its rivers and weakening the communities that depend upon them is not necessarily becoming wealthier. Perhaps we need to pay as much attention to what we leave capable of sustaining life as to what we produce and consume.
Further reading: Tenzin Seldon on Gross Domestic Regeneration and the United Nations' Beyond GDP initiative.