IPA

New York, 2 April – United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today highlighted the need for an economic model that incorporates social and environmental progress in efforts to achieve sustainable development.

“Gross National Product has long been the yardstick by which economies and politicians have been measured. Yet it fails to take into account the social and environmental costs of so-called progress,” the Secretary-General said in his remarks at a high-level meeting at UN Headquarters in New York.

Convened by the Government of Bhutan as a contribution to preparations for Rio+20, the meeting – “Happiness and Well-being: Defining a New Economic Paradigm” – brought together hundreds of representatives from governments, religious organizations, academia and civil society.

In the early 1970s, the Himalayan kingdom introduced the new measurement of national prosperity, focusing on people’s well-being rather than economic productivity. In recent years, there has been growing interest in this concept – known as “gross national happiness” (GNH) – with the General Assembly adopting a resolution in 2011, which noted that the gross domestic product (GDP) indicator “does not adequately reflect the happiness and well-being of people in a country.”

Bhutan’s Prime Minister, Jigme Thinley, said that Gross National Happiness is a development model that has guided Bhutan’s development for several decades and that he hoped Monday’s meeting would result in recommendations which governments can act on.

“I hope that by 2015 the international community will have adopted a sustainability-based economic paradigm, committed to promoting true human well-being and happiness, and ensuring at the same time, the survival of all species with which we share this planet,” he said.

“We need a new economic paradigm that recognizes the parity between the three pillars of sustainable development,” the Secretary-General told the meeting’s participants. “Social, economic and environmental well-being are indivisible. Together they define gross global happiness.”

Mr. Ban praised the Bhutanese Government for initiating the meeting, and noted that other countries have also started to explore various ways to measure prosperity that go beyond material wealth such as Costa Rica, which strongly supports environmentally responsible development, and the United Kingdom, where statistical authorities are experimenting with measuring ‘national well-being.’

The Secretary-General stressed that sustainable development is intricately linked to happiness and well-being, and underlined that the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, also known as Rio+20, in Brazil in June will need to provide an outcome that reflects this.

High-level officials from a number of countries, including Australia, Costa Rica, Finland, India, Israel, Japan, Morocco, Thailand and the United Kingdom, spoke at the High-level Meeting to voice their support for various aspects of going beyond GDP as a measure of human progress.

An interview with Prime Minister Thinley can be found on-line at:  http://www.un.org/apps/news/newsmakers.asp?NewsID=49
A webcast of the high-level event can be found at www.un.org/webcast

For more information on Rio+20, visit www.uncsd2012.org.

To join the global conversation on Rio+20: The Future We Want, visit www.un.org/futurewewant

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