The measure of flourishing

News Article

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

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

Yadvinder Malhi has written an article for Aeon magazine, presenting a new metric which asks not only how wealthy or healthy societies are, but what kinds of landscapes, cities and planetary relationships their prosperity produces.

The metric has been developed in conjction with researchers from the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and the UN Human Development Report Office, as well as several other academics in fields ranging from history to anthropology and psychology.

Related Outputs

Systems

An aspirational approach to planetary futures

Erle C. Ellis, Yadvinder Malhi, Hannah Ritchie, Jasper Montana, Sandra Díaz, David Obura, Susan Clayton, Melissa Leach, Laura Pereira, Emma Marris, Michael Muthukrishna, Bojie Fu, Peter Frankopan, Molly K. Grace, Samira Barzin, Krushil Watene, Nicholas Depsky, Josefin Pasanen & Pedro Conceição

Nature (2025)

A new paper in Nature Prevailing frameworks to address planetary environmental challenges tend to focus on setting goals, targets, or boundaries to limit human harm to ecosystems or species. Here we propose an aspirational approach aimed at empowering people to shape a better future for all of life on Earth.