The Next Frontier-Human Development and the Anthropocene: UNDP Human Development Report 2020

• Published in: Environment : science and policy for sustainable development Vol. 63; no. 3; pp. 34 - 40
• Main Author: Baumann, Franz
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington Routledge 24.03.2021; Kirkpatrick Jordon Foundation
• Subjects: Anthropocene; Anxiety; Civilization; Conferences; Economic performance; Endangered; GDP; Gross Domestic Product; Human development; Human influences; Science; Teachers
• ISSN: 0013-9157; 1939-9154
• DOI: 10.1080/00139157.2021.1898908

One must thank the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for putting together the 2020 UNDP Human Development Report (HDR). It is a magisterial work and could well be an excellent textbook, if a slightly nerdy one, useful more for dedicated teachers than for students new to the subject, not to mention the general public. At more than 400 pages, including over 120 pages of notes, references, and statistics, its volume is twice that of the first HDR, published in 1990. One can only hope that the encyclopedic scope enhances rather than diminishes its real-world impact. This reviewer's apprehension is that its sheer volume, and its burrowing down into too many rabbit holes, blurs a terribly urgent message, namely, that human civilization is endangered. Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen thought the time right to replace gross domestic product (GDP), a crude proxy of a country's economic performance, with an equally elegant, yet infinitely more meaningful metric.