Seldon: New systems needed to fight climate change
Aspen has lost 31 days of winter since 1970 and Colorado’s snowpack this past season was the worst on record, with more than a quarter of the state’s monitoring sites snowless on April 1 for the first time ever.
These numbers point to a larger accounting failure, one that runs through every major economy in the world.
I have studied applied math and economics throughout my life, and I now run a climate-focused venture fund. From both perspectives, the same 90-year-old metric keeps getting in the way of real progress: Gross Domestic Product.
Simon Kuznets introduced the first national income measures to Congress in 1934, laying the foundation for what became GDP. He originally intended it as an emergency measurement tool during the Great Depression, with the caveat to lawmakers that it should not be used as a measure of national welfare.
Today, heads of state still rank their success by it, and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund use GDP-equivalent metrics to sort economies into tiers that determine everything from lending eligibility to global standing. No other single system has more influence over policy and capital today.
The inherent problem is that GDP rewards production rather than regeneration. A clear case is the Amazon rainforest, home to one of the world’s biggest carbon sinks, whose destruction contributes to the warming trend that’s reshaping Colorado’s winters.
Brazil’s pulp and paper sector, the second-largest in the world, has driven significant GDP growth for decades through aggressive clearing of the rainforest. Even as the country cut direct Amazon deforestation to an 11-year low in 2025, fire activity in the basin hit its highest level since 2010 and fire-driven forest degradation has climbed 163% between 2022 and 2024.
On the GDP scoreboard, the country is growing. In practice, its long-term productive capacity is being burned through by feedback loops that GDP wasn’t designed to account for.
The better metric we should be introducing to the global economic scale is Gross Domestic Regeneration. Where GDP measures how fast a country produces, GDR measures whether it actually regenerates through three dimensions:
● Ecological regeneration measures how well a country’s natural systems are being restored, tracked through indicators like net carbon position and biodiversity.
● Social regeneration measures the strength of its community bonds and the narrowing of wealth gaps.
● Capital regeneration measures the resilience of its economy, including its ability to withstand shocks and provide stable livelihoods.
And the three pillars reinforce each other:
● Restoring ecosystems reduces resource conflict and climate migration, which strengthens communities.
● Stronger communities with narrower wealth gaps protect ecosystems more effectively and reduce political risk for investors.
● An economy built to absorb shocks, one that puts natural and social capital on its balance sheet, gives both ecological and social systems the room to regenerate. For long-term investors, that means a more durable return profile than the extractive model currently on offer.
The country of Bhutan has been testing a version of this for more than fifty years. In 1972, Bhutan’s Fourth King told a journalist that his country cared more about “Gross National Happiness” than Gross National Product. In 2008, that principle was even written into Bhutan’s constitution. Every new policy proposal is scored on roughly 22 variables across nine domains of well-being and proposals that fail the test are sent back for revision.
The results speak for themselves — the share of Bhutanese reporting deep happiness rose from 40.9% in 2010 to 48.1% in 2022. Net deforestation over the last three decades has been essentially zero.
Earth Day brings its usual round of pledges and panels, which do some good to kickstart the conversation, but ultimately don’t shift the underlying system. The harder, more structural work is to change what and how we measure to redirect capital toward the forms of economic activity that actually sustain a country over decades.
Tenzin Seldon is founder and managing partner of The Pulse Fund.