Green Gross Domestic Product Definition
Green Gross Domestic Product (Green GDP) is an index of economic growth with the environmental consequences of that growth factored in.
In 2004, Wen Jiabao announced that the green GDP index would replace the GDP index itself in personnel decisions of the Communist Party of China.
Statisticians caution that a 'Green GDP' is fraught with methodological problems; in particular, monetizing the loss of biodiversity or the impacts of climate change caused by carbon dioxide emissions is highly controversial, and published results differ by orders of magnitude.
Most environmental experts prefer physical indicators (such as "waste per capita" or "CO2 emissions per year"), which may be aggregated to indices such as the Ecological Footprint or a "Sustainable Development Index" as calculated by the Dashboard of Sustainability.