Research

Similar to the advento of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) becoming a bell-weather measure of accounting for economic production following the Great Depression, the necessity to account for fluxuations in ecosystem services arises out of the current climate crisis. In modernity, we are expriencing a "Great Degradation" in natural captial. With our growing understanding of the inter-play between economy and our environment, a first step in combatting the adverse effects of climate change and loss in biodiversity is by taking stock of our current accounts. Gross Ecosystem Product (GEP) puts a valuation to aggregate ecosystem services in a comparable fashion to that of GDP. This is both a mixture of marketed and non-marketed ecosystem services -- in which the former is regularly accounted for in GDP while the later remains unaccounted.

While there has been several studies promoting the use of as well as a refinement on the definition of GEP (or otherwise referred to as natural capital accounting), the application of these measures has not reached a global scale. Rather, only in China has the sub-national accounting of natural capital and ecosystem services been widely adopted. This lack of estimation for GEP at a global scale limits the utility of the measure for both a description of the current GEP accounts, comparision across regions, and assessments of how federal policies affect these measures.

GEP is a measure of the flow of ecosystem services (income). And natural captial accounts is a measure of the stock capital (assets and wealth).

Today, there are many different approaches to gauging sustainable resource use. What are the most commonly used indices, and how do they vary? Using these indices, how can we produce policy relevant metrics? Lab members Sumil Thakrar, Yanxu Long, Nfamara Dampha, Haku Bo, Evelyn Strombom, Adriana Castillo, Saleh Mamun, Michelle Heyn, Mwaso Mnensa, and Steve Polasky are reviewing past indices and metrics for this paper.