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Bhutan has measured citizens' well-being using gross national happiness since 2008 (left); GDP has been in use since the 1944 Bretton Woods meeting (right).

a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f oWhile global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has increased more than three-fold since 1950, economic welfare, as estimated by the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), has actually decreased since 1978. We synthesized estimates of GPI over the 1950-2003 time period for 17 countries for which GPI has been estimated. These 17 countries contain 53% of the global population and 59% of the global GDP. We compared GPI with Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Human Development Index (HDI), Ecological Footprint, Biocapacity, Gini coefficient, and Life Satisfaction scores. Results show a significant variation among these countries, but some major trends. We also estimated a global GPI/capita over the 1950-2003 period. Global GPI/capita peaked in 1978, about the same time that global Ecological Footprint exceeded global Biocapacity. Life Satisfaction in almost all countries has also not improved significantly since 1975. Globally, GPI/capita does not increase beyond a GDP/capita of around $7000/capita. If we distributed income more equitably around the planet, the current world GDP ($67 trillion/yr) could support 9.6 billion people at $7000/capita. While GPI is not the perfect economic welfare indicator, it is a far better approximation than GDP. Development policies need to shift to better account for real welfare and not merely GDP growth.

A high and sustainable quality of life is a central goal for humanity. Our current socio-ecological regime and its set of interconnected worldviews, institutions, and technologies all support the goal of unlimited growth of material production and consumption as a proxy for quality of life. However, abundant evidence shows that, beyond a certain threshold, further material growth no longer significantly contributes to improvement in quality of life. Not only does further material growth not meet humanity's central goal, there is mounting evidence that it creates significant roadblocks to sustainability through increasing resource constraints (i.e., peak oil, water limitations) and sink constraints (i.e., climate disruption). Overcoming these roadblocks and creating a sustainable and desirable future will require an integrated, systems level redesign of our socio-ecological regime focused explicitly and directly on the goal of sustainable quality of life rather than the proxy of unlimited material growth. This transition, like all cultural transitions, will occur through an evolutionary process, but one that we, to a certain extent, can control and direct. We suggest an integrated set of worldviews, institutions, and technologies to stimulate and seed this evolutionary redesign of the current socio-ecological regime to achieve global sustainability.cultural adaptation ͉ ecology ͉ societal decline T he history of human-dominated socio-ecological systems is one of successive climbs to regional prominence followed by crises that were either successfully addressed, leading to sustainability, or not, leading to decline. Historical research demonstrates that crises leading to a society's decline do not result from a single, easily identifiable cause with easily identifiable solutions (1-4). They usually result from the human-dominated ecosystem moving to a brittle, nonresilient state caused by internal changes or external forcings (2,5,6).For example, the earth's climate has gone through natural and often abrupt variations, creating new conditions, persistent for decades and centuries, that were unfamiliar to the inhabitants of the time (5). Dramatic effects and societal decline, however, occur only when socioecological systems have become brittle and unable to adapt due to other causes (1-4), including deforestation and habitat destruction, soil degradation (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of invasive alien species, human population growth, and increased per capita impact of people. Some ancient civilizations that were not able to adapt to climate change, leading to their demise, include:Y The Akkadian empire of Mesopotamia, where a shift to more arid conditions contributed to abrupt collapse about 6,180 years ago (7). Y Parts of low-latitude northeastern Africa and southwestern Asia, where severe drought caused major disruption about 4,300 years ago (8). Y The Tiwanaku civilization of the central Andes, where a prolonged period of drought...

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