2021届高考英语原汁原味外刊热点话题 经济衡量新指标（GEP）关注经济的可持续发展（解析版）.docVIP

暑期原汁原味赏析报刊特训专辑day5： Scientific American：Nature's Goods and Services Get Priced 经济衡量新指标（GEP）关注经济的可持续发展 课前导读： 在发展经济的过程中，我们无意识地破坏了自然的某些部分，那是一些对人类的福祉也很重要的部分。明尼苏达大学环境经济学家斯蒂芬.波拉斯基和他的同事们创造了一种新的测量方法：生态系统生产总值（GEP）。 Gross domestic product, the GDP, is a simple way to describe the health of big, complicated economies. And for the last century, the goal of many countries has been to make their GDP go up.But concentrating only on GDP has had some downsides. “”In growing the economy, we have, as an unintended consequence, destroyed parts of nature, which are also important for our well-being." said Stephen Polasky, an environmental economist at the University of Minnesota. He and his colleagues have created a new measurement: the gross ecosystem product, or GEP."So that we actually have metrics that say how are we doing on ecosystems management, managing nature—and not just for nature's sake but how is that coming back and influencing our own well-being? So really, GEP is trying to say, What is the contribution of nature to the economy? So in a parallel way to what GDP does in measuring economic performance." Evaluating up the economic value of timber and fisheries is fairly straightforward. But other benefits of a healthy environment can be less obvious. Insects pollinate crops. Intact rivers improve water quality and buffer downstream cities from floods. Thriving ecosystems draw tourists, who spend money. "And part of the issue here is that it is difficult to price some of these things. Some people even say, Well, they are priceless. Unfortunately, what it means in Zero value in the GDP but not in the GEP. For example, Polasky and his colleagues calculated the figure for Qinghai, a province in western China. They found that the gross ecosystem product exceeded GDP in the year 2000 and equaled three quarters of GDP in 2015. Over that period, GEP rose by 127 percent, thanks to major restoration efforts and the increasing value of water. The results are in the Proceedings of t