By Livia Bizikova, IISD

The High-Level Expert Group on Beyond GDP has issued an interim progress report that proposes an approach to complement Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by focusing on three pillars of sustainability (economic, environmental, and social), resilience and vulnerability, institutional aspects, and international cooperation. It highlights illustrative indicators capturing material well-being, health, education, environmental quality, subjective well-being, social capital, and governance.

The report also recommends adjustments to GDP to capture inequality and sustainability as part of the effort to refine the metric. It underscores the critical need for political commitment and capacity building to enable governments to integrate well-being data into policy design, implementation, and evaluation.

Mandated by the outcome of the Summit of the Future (SoF), the UN Secretary-General appointed the High-Level Expert Group in May 2025 to lead a consultative process aimed at developing recommendations for countries and institutions to adopt more comprehensive measures of sustainable development progress beyond traditional GDP metrics.

Since 2016, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) has advanced applications of expanded wealth frameworks to complement GDP, most notably the World Bank’s comprehensive wealth framework and the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) inclusive wealth approach, focusing on how to measure the assets that sustain well-being across economic, environmental, and social dimensions. Developed in close collaboration with academics, statisticians, and policymakers in Indonesia, Ethiopia, and Trinidad and Tobago, these applications examine data availability, policy relevance of beyond GDP estimates, and existing capacity gaps.

Drawing on this work, this article presents lessons learned to inform the proposed approach to measuring progress beyond GDP, including capturing impacts on nature, challenges with creating a dashboard to complement GDP, and considerations on ensuring country ownership.

Changes in nature have to be captured comprehensively

In terms of specific indicators and measurement systems, it is critical to not only focus on environmental pollution and biodiversity, as the interim progress report suggests, but also include indicators to capture the status of natural capital. Natural capital plays a vital role in human well-being, providing clean water, regulating air quality, supporting food production, supplying raw materials, and enriching culture. The scale of these benefits depends on the “stocks” (physical quantities) of natural capital available within a country. Because these stocks are vulnerable to depletion and degradation through human activity, it is essential to measure and monitor them to ensure they are maintained or enhanced in both quantity and quality over time.

Our findings from 2000-2020 reveal that countries devote limited resources to addressing natural capital challenges, often neglecting targeted investments to combat land degradation, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. Nevertheless, many countries in Africa and South Asia have advanced efforts to develop natural capital accounts, supported by the World Bank and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and initiatives such as the System of Environmental Economic Accounting (SEEA), which links environmental statistics with economic data. These initiatives highlight a valuable opportunity to build on existing progress and strengthen the measurement of natural capital moving forward.

A cautious approach to dashboards with multiple indicators

One of GDP’s key strengths lies in its simplicity: a single, concise figure that can be easily communicated to diverse audiences – from experts to policymakers, media, and the general public. Replicating this level of aggregation to address GDP’s shortcomings is challenging, since many aspects of well-being and sustainability cannot be monetized and span highly diverse domains, from people to nature.

The risk with dashboards is that including too many indicators and multiple modified versions of GDP to capture inequality, sustainability, and the value of goods and services may limit their usability beyond small groups of decision makers or highly engaged stakeholders. In our work, we used a composite wealth framework that aggregates across five forms of capital to compare trends with GDP. While such broad aggregation may not be feasible in this context, recommendations should emphasize a limited set of headline indicators or indices – placed alongside GDP – to provide a clear and accessible complement.

Building country ownership and integrating beyond GDP efforts into policymaking

Encouraging countries to adopt and apply beyond GDP approaches in assessing policies and budget allocations – rather than focusing solely on short-term GDP growth – is one of the most critical and challenging aspects of these efforts. This priority has been highlighted in a UN briefing note, and reinforced in the Pact for the Future, which urges Member States to develop a limited set of country-owned indicators to complement and extend beyond GDP.

The High-Level Expert Group’s interim progress report provides examples of countries such as New Zealand, the Netherlands, Canada, and Ecuador that have introduced dashboard systems to complement GDP. These countries, supported by strong statistical capacities and advanced measurement frameworks, have integrated indicators of well-being, natural capital, and other dimensions into their policymaking processes.

Drawing on IISD’s experience in supporting countries to develop complementary measures to GDP, it is essential to outline and support the practical steps for integration, including by: identifying which agencies should lead; establishing coordination mechanisms; determining the stages of the policy process during which complementary indicators can be introduced; and clarifying how they can be applied throughout the policy cycle, from design to implementation and evaluation.

Connecting beyond GDP efforts to national and global challenges

To effectively engage countries and international agencies, a crucial element of complementing GDP is linking proposed indicators directly to the pressing challenges countries face, such as poverty, food insecurity, lack of access to healthcare and education, and environmental sustainability. In practice, we have observed tensions between addressing GDP as an overarching framework and focusing on specific issues like climate change, poverty reduction, or food security.

Our experience shows that beyond GDP metrics can reveal how certain investments undermine long-term development priorities. Examples include heavy reliance on fossil fuel extraction as a driver of GDP, insufficient investment in agriculture because it is not viewed as a growth sector, or limited funding for education and skills development that could enhance productivity and employment.

Actors at all levels should therefore explicitly connect sectoral priorities such as climate change or biodiversity to efforts that complement GDP. Doing so will signal that reliance on GDP alone as the guiding mechanism must be questioned and rethought. The Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4), followed by the Second World Summit for Social Development, reaffirmed the commitment outlined in the Pact for the Future to develop a complementary framework of progress, including alternative indicators beyond GDP. The widespread use of complementary alternatives to GDP will go a long way to embedding information that integrates sustainable development considerations and long-term perspectives into decision making, and help build a sustainable future.

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This story is part of a series that seeks to raise awareness of efforts to advance metrics that go beyond GDP, focusing primarily on publications produced by international agencies, peer-reviewed journals, and news stories. By highlighting topics of theoretical and conceptual significance, including suggestions and applications of specific indicators and indices to complement GDP, the series aims to inform and support sustainable development decision makers in their efforts to go beyond GDP. This project was made possible through financial support provided by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).