Jan 18, 2019
By Westley Dang
“The $100 Trillion Opportunity”

Arvind Gupta, Managing Director & Founder of IndieBio:

Meeting the challenge of climate change is commonly characterized as a tradeoff with industrial economic growth. In order to save the planet, we have to reduce consumption, and we have to stop production, and we have to give up behaviors we’ve long been accustomed to. The party’s over. In the conventional framing, both planetary health and declining human health are inevitable suppressors of economic activity.

In a three-part series of articles, hosted on Medium, IndieBio founder Arvind Gupta argues the opposite. He believes that the technological shift that will be forced on the economy by the twin catastrophes of planetary and human health comprises the greatest economic opportunity ever. Biotech is the technology that will drive this change, and those with the better biology will win this growth.

IndieBio modeled the global economy 25 years from now, in 2043, by industry. Just as the economy doubled between 1971 and 1994, and then doubled again from 1994 to 2018, it will double once more by 2043, adding $100 trillion to global GDP. But to achieve that, we will have to reinvent manufacturing and production to lower our demand of the planet’s natural resources.

Many have long declared there’s an economic opportunity in sustainable technologies. But nobody has ever put such a large figure on that opportunity — orders of magnitude bigger.

Read the series on Medium:

The $100 Trillion Opportunity
https://medium.com/indiebio-sf/the-100-trillion-opportunity-3d827f18c56a

Designing Science
https://medium.com/indiebio-sf/designing-science-24f2a4b5767f

Accelerating Planetary Health
https://medium.com/indiebio-sf/accelerating-planetary-health-f8ee3e70c603