Is our obsession with GDP killing the climate?

For nearly a century, governments around the world have measured
the health of their economies by a single metric: GDP, or Gross
Domestic Product. It measures a country’s economic growth, and
over the years has become a shorthand for national progress; a
rising GDP is generally understood to mean more people in work,
more companies in business, living standards on the rise. Yet, as
experts have argued for decades, there is a lot that GDP leaves
out. While it measures the value of all goods and services
produced and consumed in an economy, it doesn’t account for
nature, wellbeing, or planetary health. To GDP, a 100-year-old
carbon capturing tree is worthless until its chopped down and
sold as timber. Cleaning up after disasters, such as extreme
weather events, improve GDP due to the increase in spending -
even as people and planet suffer the consequences. In an age of
climate breakdown, many economists are arguing that our obsession
with GDP is damaging the planet. So is it time to ditch GDP as a
measure of progress and come up with a new metric that puts
sustainability at its core? Presenters Jordan Dunbar and Tanya
Beckett are joined by the economists: Professor Kate Raworth,
Senior Associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change
Institute Professor Tim Jackson, Director of Centre for
Understanding Sustainable Prosperity Professor Jayati Ghosh,
University of Massachusetts, Amherst Dr Celestin Monga, visiting
professor of public policy at Harvard University