GreenGDP英语写作材料

Green GDP is an attempt by economists to measure the growth of an economy compared to the harm production does to the environment. This is done by subtracting the costs of environmental and ecological damage done in a specific period of time from the gross domestic product, or GDP, from that some time. As a result, the damage done to the environment as a whole is factored into the equation to give a clearer picture of the consequences of growing an economy. Unfortunately, green GDP can be difficult to measure because of the problems inherent in trying to quantify the costs of ecological and environmental damage.Environmental concerns have come to the forefront of nearly every aspect of life, as people become increasingly concerned with depleted natural resources and polluted environments. These concerns are often not taken into consideration when measuring the strength of an economy. The gross domestic product, which is a measurement of both the consumption and production within a country, isn't meant to encompass these environmental issues. As a result, green GDP has been at the forefront of efforts to marry economic and environmental concerns.The basic gist of the problem the green GDP calculation is trying to solve is what exactly the price of economic growth is in terms of the quality of life within that area. For example, a factory that maintains an excellent production schedule will definitely add to the GDP in the country in which it is located. If that factory excessively pollutes the air in the process, the economic growth it has spurred is somewhat negated by the environmental damage it has done.One way that green GDP attempts to tackle is this problem is by subtracting the costs of environmental damage from the overall GDP of a nation. These costs can come in terms of the resources that have been depleted by production, which can include minerals, land, forests, and water, among others. As a result, companies that use production techniques that sustain the environment will be more beneficial to this measurement.In addition, the green GDP also takes into account any monetary damage done to the environment in terms of pollution. These can be difficult to put into hard numbers, which makes doing this exercise more of an approximation that an exact calculation. Pollution from production may not show up in an environment for years, and putting a price tag on the amount may be just a rough estimation. Still, the numbers give economists and environmentalists something concrete to use when demonstrating the negative effects of consumption and production.The green gross domestic product (green GDP) is an index of economic growth with the environmental consequences of that growth factored into a country's conventional GDP. Green GDP monetizes the loss of biodiversity, and accounts for costs caused by climate change. Some environmental experts prefer physical indicators (such as "waste per capita" or "carbon dioxide emissions per year"), which may be aggregated to indices such as the "Sustainable Development Index".Rationale[edit]The motivation for creating a Green GDP originates from the inherent limitations of GDP has as an indicator of economic performance and social progress. It only assesses gross output, and does not have a mechanism for identifying the wealth and assets that underlie output.[2] This is problematic because it cannot account for permanent or significant depletions or replenishment of these assets. Ultimately, GDP has no capacity to identify whether the level of income generated in a country is sustainable. Richard Stone, one of the creators the original GDP indicator, suggested that while “the three pillars on which an analysis of society ought to rest are studies of economic, socio-demographic and environmental phenomenon,” he had done little work in the area of environmental issues.[3]In particular, natural capital is poorly represented in GDP; resources are not adequately considered as economic assets.[4] Relative to their costs, companies and policy makers also do not give sufficient weight to the future benefits generated by restorative or protective environmental projects. As well, the important positive externalities that arise from forests, wetlands and agriculture are unaccounted for or otherwise hidden because of practical difficulties around measuring and pricing these assets.[2] Similarly, the impact that the depletion of natural resources or increases in pollution can and do have on the future productive capacity of a nation are unaccounted for in traditional GDP estimates.[2]The need for a more comprehensive macroeconomic indicator is consistent with the conception of sustainable development as a desirable phenomenon.[5] GDP is mistakenly appropriated as a primary indicator of well-being, and as a result, it is used heavily in the analysis of political and economic policy. Green GDP would arguably be a more accurate indicator or measure of societal well-being. Therefore, the integration of environmental statistics into national accounts, and by extension, the generation of a Green GDP figure, would improve countries’ abilities to manage their economies and resources.History[edit]Many economists, scientists and other scholars have theorized about adjusting macroeconomic indicators to account for environmental change. The idea was developed early on through the work of Nordhaus and Tobin (1972), Ahmad et al. (1989), Repetto et al. (1989), and Hartwick (1990).[6]In 1972, William Nordhaus and James Tobin introduced the first model to measure the annual real consumption of households, called the Measure of Economic Welfare (MEW).[7] MEW adjusts GDP to include the value of leisure time, unpaid work and environmental damages.[7] They also defined a sustainable MEW (MEW-S) value, and their work was the precursor to more sophisticated measures of sustainable development.Repetto further explored the impact that the failure of resource-based economies to account for the depreciation of their natural capital could have, especially by distorting evaluations of macroeconomic relationships and performance.[8] He and his colleagues developed the concept of depreciation accounting, which factors environmental depreciation into “aggregate measures of economic performance.”*8+In their seminal report, "Economic Accounting for Sustainable Development," Yusuf Ahmad, Salah El Serafy and Ernst Lutz compiled papers from several UNEP-World Bank sponsored workshops,convened after 1983, on how to develop environmental accounting as a public policy tool.[9] The central theme of all of the authors’ arguments is that the system of national accounts (SNA), as it traditionally calculates income, omits important aspects of economic development that ought to be included.[9] One important disagreement on environmentally adjusted indicators is presented by Anne Harrison and Salah El Serafy in their respective chapters.[9] Harrison argues that appropriate adjustments ought to be made within the existing SNA framework, while El Serafy suggests a redefinition of what constitutes intermediate and final demand.[9] In his view, the SNA should not consider the sale of natural capital as generating value added, while at least part of the income generated from this sale should be excluded from GDP and net product.[9] This would effectively allow GDP to continue to be used extensively.[9]In “Natural Resources, National Accounting and Economic Depreciation,” John Hartwick presents an accounting methodology to find NNP inclusive of the depletion of natural resource stock by representing the use of natural resources as “economic depreciation magnitudes.”*10+This method of accounting, which makes adjustments to the existing national account indicators, found traction in the System of Integrated Economic and Environmental Accounts (SEEA), published by the United Nations as an appendix to the 1993 SNA.[11] The report offered five approaches, or versions, to developing environmental accounts.[11] Over the years, the SEEA has been expanded and revised in view of the increased sophistication of accounting methodologies and technology. This revision will be explored in greater detail in the “Global Initiatives” section. Ultimately, the importance of the SEEA with respect to the Green GDP is that it is possible to create full-sequence accounts from which aggregates such as Green GDP can be derived and compared internationally, and many countries have begun this process.[12]Several reports and initiatives after the SEEA-1993 have explored the possibility of expanding or changing the scope of environmentally-adjusted macroeconomic indicators. As the popularity of green GDP and other environmentally adjusted macroeconomic indicators grows, their construction will increasingly draw on this continuously developing body of research, especially with respect to the methodology associated with valuing non-market capital (e.g., services from natural capital which exist outside of traditional market settings).In 1993, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the official bookkeeper of the U.S. economy, began responding to concerns that the GDP needed retooling. The agency began working on a green accounting system called Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounts. These initial results released in 1994 showed that GDP numbers were overstating the impact of mining companies to the nation's economic wealth. Mining companies didn't like those results, and in 1995 Alan B. Mollohan, a Democratic House Representative from West Virginia's coal country, sponsored an amendment to the 1995 Appropriations Bill that stopped the Bureau of Economic Analysis from working on revising the GDP and that's where things stand today.[13][14]Costanza et al. (1997) estimated the current economic value of 17 ecosystem services for 16 biomes.[15] The value of the entire biosphere, most of which exists outside of the market, is estimated conservatively to be between $16–54 trillion per year.[15] By comparison, global GNP is approximately $18 trillion per year.[15] The size of this figure demonstrates the significance of ecosystem services on human welfare and income generation, and the importance of identifying and recognizing this value. The valuation techniques used by the authors were often based on estimations of individuals’ “willingness-to-pay” for ecosys tem services.[15]Kunte et al. (1998) use their paper "Estimating National Wealth: Methodology and Resuts" todemonstrate that expanding the national accounts to include natural capital is a “practical *and necessary+ exercise.”*16+ They estimate the total wealth of nations by including different components of wealth in their calculations, including natural capital. They place values on natural capital by using the concept of economic rent. “Economic rent is the return on a commodity in excess of the minimum required to bring forth its services. Rental value is therefore the difference between the market price and cost of production / extraction.”*16+ Following this, and by adjusting calculations for (un)sustainable use patterns, they are able to determine the stock of natural capital in a country that more accurately reflects its wealth.[16]Nature’s Numbers: Expanding the National Economic Accounts to Include the Environment, written by William Nordhaus and Edward Kokkelenberg and published in 1999, examined whether or not to broaden the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) to include natural resources and the environment.[17] The panel, which addressed this question, concluded that extending the NIPA and developing supplemental environmental accounts should be a high priority goals for the U.S., because these would provide useful data on a variety of economic issues and government trends, which entailed both replenishing and extractive activities.[17] One of the major findings of the report is that it is fundamentally necessary for green adjustments to account for instances when natural capital is discovered or replenished, along with general depletive activities.In 2004, Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, announced that the green GDP index would replace the Chinese GDP index itself as a performance measure for government and party officials at the highest levels. The first green GDP accounting report, for 2004, was published in September 2006. It showed that the financial loss caused by pollution was 511.8 billion yuan ($66.3 billion), or 3.05 percent of the nation's economy.[18]As an experiment in national accounting, the Green GDP effort collapsed in failure in 2007, when it became clear that the adjustment for environmental damage had reduced the growth rate to politically unacceptable levels, nearly zero in some provinces. In the face of mounting evidence that environmental damage and resource depletion was far more costly than anticipated, the government withdrew its support for the Green GDP methodology and suppressed the 2005 report, which had been due out in March, 2007.[19]Independent estimates of the cost to China of environmental degradation and resource depletion have for the last decade ranged from 8 to 12 percentage points of GDP growth.[20] These estimates support the idea that, by this measure at least, the growth of the Chinese economy is close to zero.The most promising national activity on the Green GDP has been from India. The country's environmental minister, Jairam Ramesh, stat ed in 2009 that “It is possible for scientists to estimate green GDP. An exercise has started under the country’s chief statistician Pronab Sen and by 2015, India’s GDP numbers will be adjusted with economic costs of environmental degradation."[21]Organizations[edit]The Global Reporting Initiative's (GRI) core goals include the mainstreaming of disclosure on environmental, social and governance performance. Although the GRI is independent, it remains a collaborating centre of UNEP and works in cooperation with the United Nations Global Compact. It produces one of the world's most prevalent standards for sustainability reporting —alsoknown as ecological footprint reporting, environmental social governance (ESG) reporting, triple bottom line (TBL) reporting, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting. It is working on a Green GDP to be implemented worldwide.Current debate[edit]Some critics of environmentally adjusted aggregates, including GDP, point out that it may be difficult to assign values to some of the outputs that are quantified. This is a particular difficulty in cases where the environmental asset does not exist in a traditional market and is therefore non-tradable. Ecosystem services are one example of this type of resource. In the case that valuation is undertaken indirectly, there is a possibility that calculations may rely on speculation or hypothetical assumptions.Supporters of adjusted aggregates may reply to this objection in one of two ways. First, that as our technological capabilities increase, more accurate methods of valuation have been and will continue to develop. Second, that while measurements may not be perfect in the cases of non-market natural assets, the adjustments they entail are still a preferable alternative to traditional GDP.A second objection may be found in the Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, when Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi remark that:“there is a more fundamental problem with green GDP, which also applies to Nordhaus and Tobin’s SMEW and to the ISEW/GNI indices. None of these measures characterize sustainability per se. Green GDP just charges GDP for the depletion of or damage to environmental resources. This is only one part of the answer to the quest ion of sustainability.”*1+In response to this, many advocates of environmentally adjusting GDP point out that while, in theory, a sustainability index could be more comprehensive, it is not likely to be considered with the same significance as an adjusted GDP figure. This is because GDP is the predominant indicator used in macroeconomic policy design and comparative analyses of well-being.Green GDP neededUpdated: 2013-02-27 07:19 ( China Daily) Comments Print Mail Large Medium SmallThe recent smog that shrouded large parts of China has shown it is imperative that the country thoroughly assess the environmental impact of economic activities: A system to measure "green GDP" is needed.A pilot system to evaluate the gross domestic product of the ecosystem in a northern desert, launched on Monday, is the latest attempt to measure the value of an ecosystem.Similarly, some research teams have developed accounting systems to assess the country's net GDP output minus the environmental losses caused by economic activities.Such assessments are important since GDP does not take into account any environmental costs incurred during economic expansion and so creates a false impression of economic prosperity.New green GDP assessment methods can help the government and public better grasp the realenvironmental impact of the country's economic activities, and enable the devising of policies that better balance economic growth, and environmental conservation and quality of life.The government has developed its own methodology to calculate green GDP. In 2006, environmental protection and statistics departments released a report claiming that economic losses caused by environmental degradation accounted for nearly 5 percent of the national GDP in 2004. It is regrettable that the government has stopped releasing such data since then.Indeed, it is technically very difficult to calculate the real economic value of environmental changes, and the various green GDP calculation systems in use are all disputable. But it is an essential task not only for China but all countries and organizations, although it will take time for a mature and internationally accepted system to be worked out.It is generally believed that it is not technical limits but local governments that have prevented such data from being released. Such data releases might affect the promotion prospects of local officials.It is clear that if China wants to press on with the uphill task, it must first reshuffle its performance assessment methods for government officials.Currently, economic development measured by GDP remains a crucial gauge of local officials' performance and capabilities, which is why they care more for economic expansion rather than environmental protection.。