A paradigm shift in how countries are expected to measure economic growth could make fossil fuel extraction look less valuable—and renewables more so.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)’s newly released [pdf] System of National Accounts 2025 (SNA 2025) urges governments to treat the depletion of natural resources like oil, gas, and minerals as a cost to their economies, and provides guidance on how to better reflect factors that affect wellbeing and long-term resilience.

The core shift is from using gross domestic product (GDP) to net domestic product (NDP, not to be confused with the Canadian political party) as the “conceptually preferred measure of economic growth.” If it’s implemented, the directive will have a profound impact on countries that depend heavily on resource extraction.

Norway, Russia, and Saudi Arabia could see their NDPs shrink between 10 and 20% once the depletion of their oil and gas reserves is factored in, Bert Kroese, chief statistician at International Monetary Fund, said in February.

Using NDP would fix “to some extent” the problem that GDP figures overstate the economic benefits of holding and extracting fossil fuels, UNEP economist Pushpam Kumar told Climate Home News. The recalculation could lead governments to rethink their plans for exploration and extraction.

In another brand new direction, the SNA advises that renewable energy resources like hydropower dams, wind turbines, and solar arrays be “explicitly recognized”, which would be good news for hydro-rich countries like Canada, Climate Home writes. However, the new approach would not boost the economies of countries with lots of sun and wind unless they had the panels and turbines to turn those resources into energy.

The 2025 SNA also provides “explicit guidance” on how to account for “production of electricity and heating by households, for sale and for own final use.”

In a critical boost to efforts to integrate natural assets into financial reporting, the SNA recommends including land, mineral deposits, fuel reserves, renewable energy resources, forests or other vegetation, and wild animals in the balance sheets as long as institutions are in a position to benefit from them. They would be “identified as a separate category within the asset classification.”

Since the SNA is a voluntary framework, governments are not required to adopt it.

“Accounting does not translate into policy until the analysts and decision-makers take note of that and change the course of action,” Bram Edens, statistician with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, told Climate Home.

But Australian economist and policy advisor Ken Henry welcomed the 2025 SNA as “a very impressive piece of work.”

The decades-long dependence on GDP as the measure of national and global wealth has a “dark side,” Henry said, explaining that the metric supports “large scale deforestation for timber and agriculture, the rapid depletion of all other natural resources, and the burning of fossil fuels without regard for the longer-term consequences of any of these things.”

Pointing to the escalating climate and biodiversity crises, Henry warned that their consequences could eclipse even the worst economic breakdowns. By adopting the new SNA, countries would act on the reality that “ours is, inevitably, a finite economy, as is the biosphere of which we are a part.”

At the UN Statistical Commission’s annual meeting in New York last month, more than 600 chief statisticians from around the world pledged to pursue implementation of the new SNA in their countries no later than 2030.