Well-being of People, Planet Must Be Central Metric to Attain More Balanced Sustainable Development, Deputy Secretary-General Tells Member States Briefing on Beyond GDP

Following are UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s opening remarks to the “Member States Briefing on Beyond Gross Domestic Product (GDP)” today: 

Thank you for attending this Member State Briefing on Beyond GDP.

I am delighted to be co-leading this briefing with Under-Secretary-General Guy Ryder, who shepherded the Summit of the Future where Member States agreed to advance this initiative.

Under-Secretary-General Ryder is particularly familiar with the Beyond GDP project given his earlier role as chair of the High-Level Committee on Programmes.

That Committee brought the UN system together to develop the paper “Valuing What Counts”, which set out initial recommendations for how the UN could advance the Beyond GDP initiative.  I am also joined by Under-Secretary-General Junhua Li, who as head of UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs will play a central role in taking this agenda forward.

The Department of Economic and Social Affairs is both the Secretariat for the UN Statistical Commission and co-leads the work on Beyond GDP within the UN system, working in collaboration with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

My brief remarks today will address two questions about the Beyond GDP project:  First, why do we need this project?  And second, what is the solution?

Let me begin with the first question.  In his Policy Brief on Beyond GDP, the Secretary-General emphasized what he called a “harmful anachronism” at the heart of global policymaking:  that our current metrics overlook many aspects that contribute to human well-being, while valuing some activities that harm people and planet.

Specifically, gross domestic product, or GDP, is heavily relied upon as a gauge of prosperity and is the basis for numerous targets and rankings.  Yet it provides an incomplete picture of the different dimensions of sustainable development.

Every day we see the consequences of our failure to balance economic, social and environmental dimensions of development.  The Secretary-General’s observation echoes those made by others.  Indeed, the Beyond GDP project has a long history, dating back at least to the 1960s.

Bobby Kennedy gave a famous speech in 1968 in which he lamented that measures of national income “count air pollution and cigarette advertising… locks for our doors… the loss of our natural wonder… and counts nuclear warheads.”  Meanwhile, such measures fail to account “for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play… the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.”

57 years on from that speech, in a world of climate change, deteriorating ecosystems and biodiversity loss, rising conflict and food insecurity, and historic inequalities, its message feels even more urgent and necessary today.

Let me turn then to the second question concerning the solution. To achieve a more balanced pattern of sustainable development, the well-being of people and the planet must be at the centre of what we measure and value.  By promoting measures of progress that complement GDP, we can expand the data on which policy decisions and prioritizations are made and refocus Government efforts and actions.

Again, this solution is not entirely new — and this project has the advantage of being able to build on prior work.  UNDP’s Human Development Index is a great example of a project that recasts how we measure progress that balances social and economic dimensions of progress.  The Sustainable Development Goals indicator framework provides us with a rich set of measures or indicators that we can draw from.

Individual Member States have undertaken successful efforts to widen the aperture of policymakers from which we all can learn.  This project can also benefit from recent improvements in data collection — including on environmental accounting, monitoring time use, and subjective well-being — that increase our ability to capture what matters.

The UN is uniquely placed to facilitate this work.  As the global caretaker of the sustainable development agenda, the UN is charged with promoting the three dimensions of sustainable development and has a norm-setting role in agreeing the use of common statistics across countries.  Indeed, Sustainable Development Goal 17 includes a commitment to developing Beyond GDP metrics by 2030, which this project will honour.

Let me stop here and turn to Under-Secretary-General Ryder to elaborate on how we intend to take this forward.