Global GEP

The Global GEP (Gross Ecosystem Product) project quantifies and aggregates the value of ecosystem services into a single monetary metric to complement GDP, enabling governments and institutions to integrate nature into economic decision-making, planning, and performance evaluation. NatCap Lead: UMN NatCap TEEMs. Collaborators: CAS, Stanford NatCap, SRC.

The Global GEP Project develops Gross Ecosystem Product (GEP) as a complementary accounting framework to GDP, summarizing the value of ecosystem services across material, regulating, and nonmaterial categories into a single, policy-relevant monetary metric.

GEP is constructed using methods consistent with national accounting systems, combining biophysical data on ecosystem service flows with market and nonmarket valuation approaches (e.g., market prices, avoided costs, and shadow pricing). This allows diverse ecosystem services to be expressed in a common unit and compared with economic indicators.

The framework is designed to be tractable and scalable, enabling application from subnational to national and global levels using available data. Importantly, GEP complements—not replaces—GDP: while GDP measures the value of final market goods and services, GEP captures the value of nature’s contributions, including many services not reflected in markets.

By making ecosystem service values visible and comparable, GEP results have the potential to support:

• Integration of ecological considerations into policy and planning
• Evaluation of government performance including environmental outcomes
• Design of ecological compensation and finance mechanisms
• Alignment with international standards such as the UN SEEA framework

Ultimately, the Global GEP Project advances a paradigm shift toward inclusive and sustainable development, where economic progress is evaluated alongside the health and productivity of natural capital systems.

Read more about NatCap's work on GEP.