The measure of flourishing

Human prosperity depends on nature, but no global metric has captured this with precision. Enter the Nature Relationship Index

by Yadvinder Malhi  BIO

West Lake in Hangzhou, China. Photo by Parichart Thongmee/Getty Images. All other images from The Ten Views of West Lake. Courtesy the National Palace Museum, Taipei

is professor of ecosystem science at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Oriel College. His work seeks to understand the functioning of ecosystems and the global biosphere, and use this information to aid protection and recovery. He is director of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, which adopts a multidisciplinary approach to understanding what is needed to achieve nature recovery at scale.

Edited byRichard Fisher

This week I have been in the city of Hangzhou in China for a workshop. Every morning, I have walked the shore of Xihu, or West Lake, the graceful expanse of water lapping the city’s western edge.

Looking out across the water from the promenade, lined with thick-branched camphor trees, I see layers of forested hills and majestic pagodas rise softly through the mist. The human structures enhance the harmony of the hills and water. Along the promenade, groups of men and women practise tai chi, fending off the morning chill with puffer jackets and berets. Their movements are slow, deliberative, meditative and accompanied by Chinese classical music that drifts across the lake to the cormorants fanning their wings in the weak morning sunlight.

Looking behind me, the concrete and glass tower blocks of the modern city of Hangzhou stir into wakefulness. In the 12th century, this city was Lin’an, likely the largest city in the world, with 1-2 million inhabitants and a prosperous proto-industrial economy. Marco Polo, that renowned visitor from the backwaters at the other end of Eurasia, described it as the ‘City of Heaven’ and ‘beyond dispute the finest and noblest in the world’. The afterglow of that splendour can be seen in its historic quarter with low-rise Song Dynasty architecture and bustling street markets, its rooftops a sea of curved grey eaves and tiles washing against the rise of the hills.

I first visited China in the early 1990s as a backpacker fresh out of my PhD, when it was just beginning to open economically to the world. Since then, the economy has grown spectacularly, and hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. After China’s 20th century of troubles, Hangzhou is once again a prosperous place, increasingly so as the centre of China’s AI boom. This growth has had its costs. As cities like Hangzhou rapidly expanded, dense urbanisation and lung-choking pollution followed. Carbon dioxide emissions have risen in parallel, such that China now accounts for about a third of global emissions, albeit at much lower per-capita levels than North America. The new affluence seen in shopping malls increasingly pulls on invisible planetary supply chains, driving deforestation and resource extraction in distant continents.

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Still, Hangzhou and many other cities and landscapes across China are now greening. Bare hillslopes have been reforested to reduce soil loss and flood risk. Electric vehicles increasingly dominate the streets. Air and water are cleaning up with impressive speed. And China’s carbon emissions are set to plateau and decline in the coming years as the country’s power and transport systems green and electrify.

Degradation of the natural world is a systemic risk to human prosperity

Standing between the human-nature harmony before me and the complex realities and contradictions of the modern world behind me, I reflect on the tensions posed by rapid human development. The increasing global pressure on local and planetary life-support systems threatens to unravel the progress in human wellbeing that has been secured, as well as the welfare of the myriad fellow species on this Earth.

For much of the modern era, the global narrative of economic development has been imagined as a human story unfolding against a backdrop of nature as an externality to be exploited. Forests, rivers, soils and species appear as resources to be managed, inputs to be optimised, or constraints to be overcome. Human wellbeing advances; nature reduces. In some ways, this narrative has delivered. The condition and welfare of billions of humans have been improved beyond recognition.

Yet this model of progress is breaking. The defining pressures of the 21st century suggest that reducing nature to an exploitable commodity is no longer viable. Climate change, biodiversity loss, disrupted ecosystems and rising natural-disaster risks all point to degradation of the natural world as a systemic risk to human prosperity. My field of ecology teaches us that human lives are not merely supported by nature: they are entangled with it, emerge from it, are enmeshed in it, nourished by it, and dependent on it in countless ways, from local to planetary. Humanity is an intimate part of nature, so development that undermines the living world ultimately undermines itself.

But what if the story of human development were not a trade-off? What if we could craft a narrative of development that did not ignore the interconnections between human prosperity and the flourishing of the rest of the living world? If so, how could we define and measure this expanded notion of development?

These questions motivated a paper we published last year in Nature, led by the US ecologist Erle Ellis, with colleagues from the UN Human Development Report Office, and several other academics in fields ranging from history to anthropology and psychology. We argued that what is missing from contemporary debates is not more evidence of environmental decline (we have plenty of that) but an aspirational narrative of what progress should look like in a human-dominated planet. It called for a reframing of development as flourishing with nature.

To achieve that, we proposed a new ranking of countries........

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