Post by Ralph Chami

For decades, we’ve treated GDP as a proxy for progress. But GDP was never designed to measure prosperity in an era of ecological constraint. Adam Smith wrote about The "Wealth" of Nations and not the “GDP” of Nations. Wealth, in its original sense, included the productive foundations of an economy. Land. Natural resources. The systems that sustain life and commerce. Somewhere along the way, we narrowed that vision. At a recent high-level UN meeting on this topic in Geneva, UN Secretary General Guterres and other leading economists called for moving beyond GDP toward metrics that reflect wellbeing, sustainability, and long-term resilience. The reason is straightforward. GDP measures economic activity. It does not measure the condition of the natural capital that makes that activity possible. A country can deplete its forests, degrade its fisheries, and exhaust its soil, yet GDP can still rise. From a macroeconomic perspective, that’s not growth. It’s asset drawdown. And that asset degradation is what earth-system scientists keep warning us about: Tipping Points...where nature and its ecosystems completely collapse. We have become very good at pricing what we can kill or extract, but what keeps us alive—stable climate systems, biodiversity, functioning ecosystems—we tend to treat as externalities. That asymmetry is no longer sustainable. It is now a fundamental source of systemic risk. At Blue Green Future, we’ve been working to address this structural blind spot through a new measure of GDP: what we call ReGDP™ — Regenerative GDP. ReGDP™ asks a different question: Is economic expansion strengthening the productive natural assets of a nation or eroding them? ReGDP treats Nature as a foundational economic infrastructure, unlike the current economic framework where nature is outside the economy. ReGDP explicitly recognizes the value of the living nature as infrastructure and recycles its revenues into protecting and restoring nature, supporting stewardship, and bending down the debt curve. Debt sustainability becomes very much linked to ecological sustainability. Until our measurement systems reflect that reality, markets will continue to misprice risk and misallocate capital. Moving beyond GDP to ReGDP is not a symbolic shift. It is about aligning economic logic with ecological reality. And that alignment will define the next chapter of our economy. This is the key message that I will be sharing at The Economist World Ocean Summit in Montreal. I look forward to meeting you there. #BeyondGDP #ReGDP #NaturalCapital #Macroeconomics #RegenerativeEconomy #NatureMarkets #BlueGreenFuture