Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast. We're the charity and think tank that is all about achieving ambitious leadership for the environment.

I'm Sam Alvis, head of our Green Renewal program. We're recording this the day after the Chancellor delivered his spring budget and as the economy starts to emerge from lockdown.

But as the health crisis recedes, it will leave behind it economic turmoil, high unemployment,

and the need for the government to step in to aid the recovery.

The government has promised to build back better and put green at the heart of its recovery,

both through climate and nature, even though yesterday offered pressures little concrete steps

in that direction. Without action soon, we may already have missed our chance for our recovery to put our economy on a more sustainable footing.

Much of the talk is about how we restore the economy to growth, but that won't tell us whether we're making progress on climate and nature,

where jobs are located, where wage growth is happening or isn't, or what's happening to unemployment?

Simply put, how do we know the recovery is green, and how or when will we know if it's been a success?

GDP is a lagging indicator at the best of times, let alone in the heart of a crisis.

Revisions, confidence intervals mean that the Chancellor could be getting a distorted picture of what the economy's really doing. And it's long had its critics. It's an aggregate measure that brings together several

different factors, potentially out of date, with many aspects of the modern economy. And it doesn't

capture unpaid work, things like the role of carers, which would be vital this year. In our last

podcast, my colleague Jim Elliott spoke to economist Karen Ellis about the Dasgupta review,

a major review into the economics of biodiversity commissioned by the Treasury in its effort to look at the economy differently.

The underlying drivers of environmental degradation are in the economic system.

It's a challenging space, but it is also the ultimate solution, actually, to nature loss and climate change.

Is the heart of a recession the right time to look at these metrics

and thinking differently about the economy?

Are they the same ones that will show us whether recovery is working

or whether it's moving to a more sustainable footing?

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