As we navigate accelerating and interlinked crises—from climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, to debt, rising cost-of-living, and conflict—it has never been more urgent to measure and value nature to make better decisions for development. Many people in developing countries depend on natural capital, such as forests, water, farmland, and soils, for jobs, raw materials, and food security. The Global Program for Sustainability (GPS) is at the forefront of global efforts to measure, quantify, and integrate nature and sustainability into economic decision-making to equip policy makers with the information they need to “make nature count” on balance sheets.
The GPS 2024 Annual Report showcases the breadth of our work: GPS is simultaneously harnessing the power of analytics and partnerships and shifting the intellectual discourse through groundbreaking research, while increasingly emphasizing social inclusion. Over time, our impact is growing: case studies in this report from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nepal, Nigeria, and Türkiye illustrate tangible progress in measuring the hidden values of nature’s contributions to people and integrating sustainability into economic planning, policies and investments.
One area where we have strengthened our engagement this year is our partnerships for regional and global dialogue. Partnerships—both between GPS and countries, and across countries as a result of GPS engagements—remain central to our work. In 2024, I was privileged to join the 7th Global Policy Forum on Natural Capital in Rwanda. This gathering of almost 400 in-person and online participants exemplified how GPS has helped establish a collaborative environment for knowledge sharing and capacity building. This follows from the second Africa Natural Capital Accounting Policy Forum, which was held in Nairobi in September 2023 on the sidelines of the Africa Climate Summit. These GPS-supported platforms such as the Global Policy Forum and the Africa Natural Capital Accounting Community of Practice can be instrumental in fostering nature-positive policy dialogues and scaling up successful practices. And we continue to build capacity through a range of training programs that empower local stakeholders to integrate the diverse values of nature into their development journey..
Another area where GPS has remained at the forefront this year is in continuing to develop new research that can inform and provoke development and economic discussions. The new edition of The Changing Wealth of Nations, was published in 2024. The new edition outlines an innovative approach to extend wealth accounting into blue natural capital. It builds on the work done in previous publications to enable countries to assess the value of a broad array of natural capital assets that underpin their economies and support their citizens’ well-being. GPS continued to advance the integration of nature into finance and macroeconomic modeling, providing robust data and analytical tools to inform policy decisions and investment strategies.
Finally, GPS is integrating social considerations, including gender and poverty, into ongoing work alongside nature and environmental sustainability. In Nepal, data and evidence on forests, poverty, and social inclusion has been used to expand restoration activities under the Forests for Prosperity project. In Ethiopia, gender and social analysis has informed the design of a legal framework for setting up payment-for-ecosystem services for land restoration.
