How can Inclusive Wealth be used for national policy?

Currently, the UN publishes country level data for Inclusive Wealth for countries around the world. According to these measurements, the US is sustainable. This may seem strange to local communities which are facing wildfires, heat waves, and opioid epidemics. These communities would be correct in noticing that these national figures are not capturing the wide variation in outcomes across the US. Local measures of Inclusive Wealth can capture more data and variability than cross-country metrics. In my PhD dissertation, I construct county level measures of Inclusive Wealth by also capturing local variations in health quality, job markets, air quality, water quality, and population growth. instead of finding that the US is sustainable, I find that 43% of counties are actually unsustainable when using local data and adding in additional local variables of sustainability challenges which aren't captured in the cross-country data.

The downscaled national estimates from the UN find that only 5% of counties are unsustainable because they do not account for important regional differences like resource scarcity or health quality. this emphasizes that when considering sustainability policy, we need to take into account local considerations and data if we want to have an accurate idea of what is happening locally.

Here is a map of changes in IW from 2010-2017. Red counties are unsustainable and green counties are sustainable. Now we can see the variation within the US of counties that are more or less sustainable over time which we can't capture at the national level. Most counties are unsustainable due to declines in health quality and declines in public forest land.

Now that we know that local level measures of sustainability are important, how can we use them in policy considerations and how can we use them for national level sustainability initiatives? For example, the Biden-Harris administration announced the goal of creating US Natural Capital accounts to include the total value of natural resources within the US. My community inclusive Wealth dataset is the first dataset at the US county level of estimates of Natural Capital. This allows counties to assess trade-offs in investing in different types of Natural Capital investments to understand which investments are the most helpful for generating well-being. As an example, look at the figure below which shows how a community can understand what types of ecosystem services to invest in.