Context: Recently, Uttarakhand first state in country to introduce Gross Environment Product (GEP) — forest, air, water & soil quality and quantity to be measured, assigned monetary value.
Key Points

• The environmental degradation in the state has gone beyond the acceptable limit over the past few decades, making it prone to disasters and incurring huge losses to humanity.
• GEP is all about periodically evaluating the status of the environment by measuring the growth of natural resources.
• The forest and environment department of Uttarakhand will be in charge of implementing GEP
• The department will work with any institution in the state which defines the norms that will then be evaluated by a competent authority before being adopted.
• The government is developing the formula based on a 2018 report commissioned by the state’s Directorate of Economics and Statistics. 
• It provides economic estimates for as many as 21 ecosystem services from the forest area of Uttarakhand and their contribution to the state’s GDP.
• The report was prepared by the Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM), Bhopal.

About Gross Environmental Product (GEP)

• It is a measure that allows monitoring of ecological growth parallel to economic growth, measured using the gross domestic product or GDP.

Why is GDP not sufficient?

• It is not adjusted for pollution costs. 
• If two economies have the same GDP per capita, but one has polluted air and water, it will have a disparate impact on people’s well-being. Yet GDP won’t capture it

How will GEP help?

• It will update us about the growth of forest, soil and water, and quality of air, in any given year, parallel to GDP.
• It will help understand if development is happening at the cost of ecology.
• This will help maintain a balance between economy and ecology. Currently, we are unaware how long natural resources will support us.

GEP four pillars

1. Forests: Measure trees planted every year by quantity and quality, like tree density, highlight the value and addition to forest in a given year. It can be done by the forest department
2. Water: Enhance quality and quantity of water in waterbodies.Annual precipitation and water stored will be the criteria for measuring recharge. Quality can be assessed by measuring parameters like pH and turbidity.To be implemented by water supply or soil conservation agencies.
3. Soil: Its enrichment through various inputs in the form of organic values and mitigation of soil runoff due to heavy rain in a given year should be the quantified value. This can be done by the agriculture and soil conservation department.
4. Air: Analyse air quality periodically and undertake efforts to improve the same. Such quantification will help analyse the efforts taken to check pollution through the use of CNG, encourage the use of public transport and take other control measures.