Beyond GDP in Practice: Wealth Accounts for Sustainability, Competitiveness, and Climate

Matthew Agarwala is an economist interested in measuring and delivering sustainability, wellbeing, and productivity. Motivated by the belief that 21^st century progress cannot be described by 20^th century statistics, Matthew’s work seeks to transform economic measurement to better reflect sustainability, inequality, and wellbeing. He is also a member of The Productivity Institute, which focuses on addressing the ‘productivity puzzle’, Honorary Professor at Scotland’s Rural College, and is a Senior Policy Fellow at the Yale University’s Tobin Center for Economic Policy.

Matthew regularly consults for governments and scientific organizations on topics of natural capital, ecosystem services, green finance, wellbeing, and sustainability. He enjoys working across sectors and disciplines, and his co-authors include ecologists, economists, conservation scientists and practitioners, social anthropologists, civil servants, members of UK Parliament, and Nobel Laureates in peace, medicine, physics, and chemistry. Beyond Sussex, Matthew maintains active research networks in Canada, Hong Kong, Germany, USA, Japan, and throughout the UK. He is a regular media contributor (Bloomberg, NYTimes, FT, Guardian, Times, Channel 4 News, BBC). 

Eli Fenichel is the Knobloch Family Professor of Natural Resource Economics at Yale School of the Environment and an EGC affiliate. His research approaches natural resource management and sustainability as a portfolio management problem by considering natural resources as a form of capital. He is interested in how people can and do allocate natural resources and natural resource risks through time. This leads to a strong interest in feedbacks among humans, ecosystems, and the management of coupled ecological-economic processes. Exploring the economic measurement of and accounting for natural resources is central to his research, and he continues to ask critical questions around human behavior and the dynamics of infectious diseases. Fenichel’s research is applied in a wide variety of systems including natural capital valuation, fisheries, infectious disease, groundwater, tropical forests, and grasslands.

Valerie Hickey is the Director of the Environment Department at the World Bank Group. She previously served as Global Director for the Climate Change Group and as Manager for Advisory and Operations, where she oversaw the implementation of the World Bank’s commitments on climate change, climate mainstreaming, and climate finance. Earlier in her career, she was Practice Manager for Environment in Latin America and the Caribbean, leading cross-sectoral teams supporting countries on climate change, biodiversity, sustainable forest management, pollution management, and environmental health.

Since joining the World Bank in 2003, Valerie has worked across regions, including East Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and fragile and conflict-affected settings. She led the Bank’s environment portfolio in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake and has supported the design and implementation of operations, analytics, and technical assistance on frontier issues such as the blue economy, biodiversity, and wildlife crime.

Valerie’s work focuses on deploying the World Bank’s financing, convening power, and analytical expertise to unlock healthy nature as a driver of jobs and economic growth, support resilient communities and cities, and advance green, inclusive development.

Before joining the World Bank, Valerie worked with the World Wildlife Fund, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the U.S. National Park Service. She holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Policy from Duke University.

Brian Kernohan is Chief Sustainability Officer for Manulife Investment Management. Brian is responsible for overseeing the global sustainability platform for Manulife Investment Management’s private and public markets businesses. This spans timberland, agriculture, real estate, infrastructure, private equity, and private credit as well as public markets’ equity, fixed income, and multi-asset strategies. Brian is accountable for sustainability strategy, developing internal sustainable investing policies and compliance mechanisms across Manulife Investment Management. He also supports regulatory affairs and reporting on sustainability matters.

As Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Hungary to the United Nations, he co-chaired the intergovernmental process tasked with producing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals at its heart. In 2023, as President of the UN General Assembly, he has convened the UN Conference on Water, as well as the scientific consultative process for it. 

He is a member of the Presidential Committee on Sustainable Development, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, a Distinguished Fellow of the Japan International Cooperation Agency Ogata Sadako Research Institute, Fellow of the International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Honorary Fellow of the International Science Council, Chairman of the Steering Committee, Asia Science Mission, member of the Jury of the Elizabeth Haub Award, Special Advisor to the Project on Beyond SDG project, Keio University, Japan. He is a member of the UN Council of Presidents of the General Assembly and of the Nizami Ganjavi International Center.

Leonard Nakamura is an emeritus economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, where he was Vice President and Economist and head of the Regional and Urban Economics section ot the Economics Department. He is also a research associate at the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence based in London. He has published extensively in the economics of innovation, financial economics, and economic measurement – including free goods, environmental hazards, capital, and beyond GDP. 

Jed Sundwall is the Executive Director of Radiant Earth, a nonprofit working to ensure the world’s most important data is accessible, trustworthy, and well governed. His career has been spent at the intersection of data, product development, cloud computing, economics, and policy. Before joining Radiant Earth, he spent eight years at Amazon Web Services, where he founded the AWS Open Data Program and the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, which together make over 400 petabytes of scientific data — spanning climate, genomics, and Earth observation — openly available in the cloud. The data-sharing standards he helped create are now used by NASA, USGS, the European Space Agency, and industry worldwide. His advisory work spans the National Academies, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Landsat Advisory Group, and the board of NatureServe. He designed and taught a graduate course on planetary-scale data institutions at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs and is a technical fellow at Taylor Geospatial and The Institutional Architecture Lab.

Angel Hsu is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and the Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she directs the Data-Driven EnviroLab. Her research innovates quantitative, geospatial, and data-intensive methods, including satellite remote sensing, to evaluate environmental and climate policy, with particular attention to subnational governments and the private sector. She has served as a lead author for the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Cities, a contributing author to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, and a lead author of the 2018 UNEP Emissions Gap Report chapter on non-state and subnational actors. She holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Policy from Yale University. To find out more about her work, visit: https://datadrivenlab.org/