The science for moving beyond GDP is clear—time to get the communication right

Leaders across business, politics, and society must find new ways of communicating the case for moving beyond GDP, growth, and traditional economics. Crucially, they must communicate a transition from traditional to sustainable economics, not advocate it as a step-change. That process starts by breaking down and connecting the global context, including the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Then communicating how sustainability as a whole, and all its environmental, social, and economic foundations, can thrive in tandem in the short, medium, and long term.

The new economy should be positioned alongside the old to kickstart that transition (see Exhibit 1). Achieving consensus on the medium-to-long-term case was always more straightforward; the short term was the hardest. To date, there has been persistent failure to communicate how sustainability can deliver immediate benefits to people’s lives and local communities.

This report hopes to add a new step toward crafting that communication, alongside so many that have come before. It explores a series of new economic models and metrics. The dashboard below is a first-pass visualization of these metrics alongside traditional ones. Designed for policymakers, businesses, or any part of society, it provides a deliberately simple format (to potentially and hopefully be re-worked significantly!). A format that could be discussed in cabinet, a boardroom, or on the 6pm news. We hope to continue building the case for a transition, eventually triggering the positive tipping points and systems change that sustainability needs. There is still time to lead as an individual, team, or whole organization. We invite you to join us in this effort.

Exhibit 1: Communicating both traditional and a new, sustainable economics alongside each other in simple, clear terms—a work in progress for beginning a transition to a new economy that works for the environment and all society

Note: Metrics can be color coded and incorporate directional arrows similar to existing stock market dashboards—using green, yellow, and red, for example—and expanded, contracted, added, and removed based on context and/or future work
Source: HFS Research, 2025

Don’t throw away GDP: Economic systems change must be a careful transition, but still a monumentally ambitious one

The dashboard retains GDP and growth as ‘transition metrics,’ acknowledging the complexity and systems that currently dominate economics, and can’t be discarded immediately. Retaining such traditional metrics also helps communicate the relationship between GDP, growth, and the broader set of factors that influence people’s lives. A parallel can be drawn with transition planning.

But transition plans are exactly that: transitions, not an immediate switch. Short-term action should be prioritized, but connected to a long-term vision. A switch to new economics and its communication must also be a transition—avoiding immediate market and geopolitical reaction that causes turbulence affecting the very people new economics seeks to help. A recent example is the UK’s unfunded ‘mini budget’ that triggered a crash in the pound and government bonds. The prime minister at the time became the shortest-serving ever in office. This example is NOT a defense of that administration, but a highlight of what attempts—rightly or wrongly—to break economic “orthodoxy” can lead to.

In the absence of adequate transition planning regulation beyond examples such as Brazil, New Zealand, and Australia (and the ISSB frameworks that the UK and EU have both committed to but recently rolled back), we have called for businesses to prove the virtues on all measures of such planning for politics, consumers, and other businesses—aiming for a form of critical mass and systems change.

New, sustainable economics doesn’t need to be redefined

The dashboard in Exhibit 1 is underpinned by multiple factors, based largely on existing research. These include the metrics underpinning the SDGs, gross environmental product (GEP; discussed below), public value, indices that span democracy, participation in civic life, and social justice, the HFS Research Sustainability Framework (see Exhibit 2), and beyond. The main contributing factors are:

• Decarbonization: Progress toward reducing emissions to net zero, possibly in the form of a projected date—like those being built by Dedlyne, which includes a country’s outsourced emissions through finance or manufacturing.
• Environment: GEP and broader Natural Capital methods are becoming well established, if not widely adopted, to integrate nature with existing economic systems for reporting and incentivization, akin to emissions reporting and carbon taxes.
• Social: Many social indices exist, including the UN Human Development Index (HDI), Social Progress Index, World Happiness Report/Happiness Index, Gross National Happiness (GNH), OECD Better Life Index, and Gender Inequality Index (GII). Other methods include the more qualitative approaches referenced below in the work of Mariana Mazzucato and Daniel Chandler’s work.
• Economic sustainability: Like social indices, broader measures of real economic sustainability, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) or the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), can be used and/or combined. Note that many such indices overlap heavily with social sustainability metrics.
• Governance: Indices that span democracy and participation in all aspects of civic life, such as that of The Economist, can address the extent to which political equality, justice, and fair process exist in society. The SDGs and Doughnut Economics combine environmental, social, and economic metrics into overarching frameworks, although large for the purposes of mass communication.

Exhibit 2: Breaking down the global sustainability context to find your sphere of influence and opportunities for systems-changing leadership and communication

Source: HFS Research, 2025

Time and time again, classical economics and shareholder primacy have been proven to fail

Especially since the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, it has become undeniable that focusing on traditional economic metrics does not mean a rise in living standards for the majority. It does concentrate wealth. Milton Friedman didn’t define ‘shareholder value’ in his famous essay and certainly didn’t advocate for hitting quarterly numbers above all else. Neither did Adam Smith. And it would be disastrously wrong to say there is no alternative (see Exhibit 3). But those alternatives have not yet won the communication battle at the scale we need them to.

Many have made this case with gravitas. Here are four examples out of UK institutions, for reasons that will become clear below:

• Mariana Mazzucato, through mission-driven public-private economics, based on aligning economies around clear goals.
• Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics (see also Doughnut Economics Action Lab), which illustrates sustainability as the space between planetary boundaries and ensuring a strong social foundation.
• Ha Joon Chang, with a case for economic pluralism, meaning a mixture of economic approaches to meet the situation.
• Daniel Chandler, building on the work of John Rawles, making the case for a free, fair, and equal society (that works especially for the least advantaged) as well as genuine equality of opportunity—not just in law, but in health, housing, work, education, environment, politics, and beyond.

Chandler, in Free and Equal, not only makes a powerful case but importantly outlines ways of communicating concepts such as universal basic income (UBI) and real employee representation in organizational decision making.

We include UK-based examples due to a generational missed opportunity. After winning a vast majority in the July 2024 General Election, the new government has only entrenched its aims for growth and traditional economics, leading to austerity in a public sector already decimated since the 2007–2008 financial crisis. The metrics in our dashboard, or so many other means of communication beyond GDP, could have been brought into the national—and therein international—conversation, but they weren’t.

Exhibit 3: The SDGs, Doughnut Economics, and Mission Economy have all changed the dial on sustainability measurement, strategy, and communication—we now need a breakthrough in public conversation

Source: United Nations, Doughnut Economics Action Lab, Mariana Mazzucato

GEP: India is proving that the science for moving beyond GDP exists and that there is the political and societal appetite to listen and act

Dr. Anil Prakash Joshi and the team at HESCO (Himalayan Environmental Studies and Conservation) have defined a framework to calculate GEP for the Uttarakhand state. It is expanding to multiple states in India. Global collaboration is near-finalized.

GEP was pioneered to quantify human-led ecological improvements, built around four core pillars: air, water, soil, and forest. Unlike GDP, GEP tracks restoration and sustainability efforts, not economic output alone. Each environmental component is assessed using tailored equations: Air-GEP is derived from relative improvements in the Air Quality Index; Soil-GEP hinges on growth in organic farmland; Water-GEP factors in both water harvesting and quality; Forest-GEP evaluates net afforestation adjusted by ecological tree weights.

Air and Forest GEPs saw sharp gains by 2022, water metrics rebounded modestly, and soil quality steadily improved—largely due to organic agriculture initiatives. The composite GEP score rose from 0 to 0.95 in just two years, highlighting the region’s ecological recovery post the COVID lockdown.

Exhibit 4: The application of GEP in Uttarakhand in 2020–2022 showcases the measure’s utility

Source: Joshi, et al. 2025

Monte Carlo simulations reinforced the model’s robustness but flagged future risks, especially forest degradation if current practices falter. Recommendations include broader indicator inclusion (such as biodiversity), regional calibration, and integrated policymaking. As a replicable, policy-ready tool, GEP offers a compelling blueprint to embed ecological health within development planning. Immediate replications could, for example, be across other mountainous regions in line with HESCO’s work, such as the Himalayas, Alps, Andes, Rockies, Arctic, Canadian Shield, and African highlands.

The future roadmap for GEP is expansion and continued assessment

Efforts are actively underway to compile and finalize Uttarakhand’s GEP data for the 2024–2025 assessment period. This will provide updated insights into the state of its environmental assets and the impact of ongoing conservation efforts.

In a significant development, the state of Uttar Pradesh has formally accepted GEP as a key environmental indicator. The process for comprehensive data collection across the state is currently in progress. This marks a major step toward the broader adoption of this innovative environmental metric.

The states of Bihar and Madhya Pradesh are also moving toward integrating GEP into their environmental governance. Both are now initiating data collection to lay the groundwork for their respective GEP assessments.

The expansion of GEP across India signals a potential paradigm shift in how environmental health is integrated into the development narrative for the region.

Greenwashing: The risk of a new communication

New means of communication bring new means of maliciousness as well as accidental confusion. The Anti-Greenwash Charter is one organization championing the need for transparency, authenticity, and trust in sustainability communications. Transparency in communications more broadly is a ‘disarming’ tactic—acknowledging the imperfections gives the security to promote the good being done. We need a critical mass to grow off the back of organizations sharing their success loudly and clearly, with clear strategies tied to mitigation and adaptation, aligned with transparent metrics and goals across time horizons.

The Bottom Line: Now is the time to get the communication right for new economics to achieve the systems change sustainability needs.

This report outlines the potential in (a) amplifying existing GEP and other new economy work and (b) combining that work to create and recommend a way that governments (from national to local) can communicate progress beyond traditional economics.

The 17 SDGs are too many for most communications, although excellent for measuring internal progress and as larger dashboards with color-coded indications of the trajectory of each goal. Dedlyne, as referenced above, is one such firm looking to use trajectories, summarized as dates, to communicate the SDGs and sustainability as a whole to all audiences.

Using one metric, be it GDP or GEP, fails to reflect the full story across environmental, social, and economic progress. This report provides a new experiment in simultaneously communicating ‘new and old’ economic metrics that together roll up to the Sustainable Development Goals. Please do get in touch and join our growing coalition to accelerate an effective public conversation, transition, and the systems change sustainability needs.