Is our obsession with GDP killing the climate?
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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\\u2019s 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. \\nYet, 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\\u2019t 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.\\nIn 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?\\nPresenters Jordan Dunbar and Tanya Beckett are joined by the economists:\\n \\nProfessor Kate Raworth, Senior Associate at Oxford University\\u2019s Environmental Change Institute\\nProfessor Tim Jackson, Director of Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity\\nProfessor Jayati Ghosh, University of Massachusetts, Amherst \\nDr Celestin Monga, visiting professor of public policy at Harvard University
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