ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Using gross ecosystem product (GEP) to value nature in decision making.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed.
- GEP-based ecological functional zoning and land use drivers in coastal southeast China.iScience · 2026Article
- Mapping the "Supply-Demand-Flow" of Ecosystem Services for Ecosystem Management in China.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Integrated climate effects on nitrogen cycles in global grasslands.Science advances · 2026Article
- Article
- Shifts in precipitation regimes exacerbate global inequality in grassland nitrogen cycles.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Reconciling ecosystem service supply-demand mismatches through ecological compensation in the Tibetan plateau.Carbon balance and management · 2025Article
- Carbon compensation prioritization in the loess plateau based on ecosystem service flows.iScience · 2025Article
- Evaluation of coupling coordination degree between tourism urbanization and ecosystem services in urban agglomerations in the yellow river basin.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Marine ecosystem services and natural capital in China: Opportunities for improved understanding, valuing, and policy.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Article
- Optimizing soil conservation through comprehensive benefit assessment in river basins.Environmental science and ecotechnology · 2025Article
- Promoting planetary health and well-being for all: harnessing indigenous knowledges for health with traditional, complementary and integrative health systems.Frontiers in medicine · 2025Review
- Synergies and complementarities between ecosystem accounting and the Red List of Ecosystems.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Review
- Assessing the impact of human activities on ecosystem asset dynamics in the Yellow River Basin from 2001 to 2020.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The impact of China's urbanization on ecosystem service value from the perspective of gross ecosystem product: a case study of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Evolution of the polycrisis: Anthropocene traps that challenge global sustainability.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Cross-sensitivity analysis of land use transition and ecological service values in rare earth mining areas in southern China.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Gross ecosystem product (GEP): Quantifying nature for environmental and economic policy innovation.Ambio · 2023Review
- Article
- Investing in nature can improve equity and economic returns.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
13 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Gross domestic product (GDP) summarizes a vast amount of economic information in a single monetary metric that is widely used by decision makers around the world. However, GDP fails to capture fully the contributions of nature to economic activity and human well-being. To address this critical omission, we develop a measure of gross ecosystem product (GEP) that summarizes the value of ecosystem services in a single monetary metric. We illustrate the measurement of GEP through an application to the Chinese province of Qinghai, showing that the approach is tractable using available data. Known as the "water tower of Asia," Qinghai is the source of the Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow Rivers, and indeed, we find that water-related ecosystem services make up nearly two-thirds of the value of GEP for Qinghai. Importantly most of these benefits accrue downstream. In Qinghai, GEP was greater than GDP in 2000 and three-fourths as large as GDP in 2015 as its market economy grew. Large-scale investment in restoration resulted in improvements in the flows of ecosystem services measured in GEP (127.5%) over this period. Going forward, China is using GEP in decision making in multiple ways, as part of a transformation to inclusive, green growth. This includes investing in conservation of ecosystem assets to secure provision of ecosystem services through transregional compensation payments.
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