Tenzin Seldon wants the economy to measure what it restores, not just what it produces

When Tenzin Seldon was growing up in the foothills of the Himalayas, climate change did not yet have a name in her world.

She remembers playing in a field near her home when she was young. A glacier above her community began melting faster, and eventually the water came down and took the field. Year after year, she watched the mountains around her change without understanding why.

It was only after moving to the United States that Seldon encountered the term “climate change” as a teenager. Suddenly, she had language for what she had witnessed.

At 16, she decided to dedicate her life to climate work.

More than two decades later, Seldon has moved through climate policy, entrepreneurship, and venture capital, with a focus on one question that has followed her throughout that journey: How can our economic systems value the things that allow people and the planet to thrive?

Today, she is the Founder and Managing Partner of Pulse Fund, investing in technologies designed to help transform the systems that power, feed, move, and support society. She is also developing Gross Domestic Regeneration (GDR), a framework that challenges one of the fundamental assumptions of the modern economy: that producing more is the same thing as becoming more prosperous.

For Seldon, climate action is not only about deploying new technologies. It is also about changing the systems that determine what gets financed, what gets measured, and ultimately, what society considers valuable.

Finding the missing piece in climate action

Seldon graduated at the top of her class from Stanford University, earning Phi Beta Kappa honors and graduating summa cum laude with highest distinction. She then became a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, where she earned a dual master’s degree. She later worked with the United Nations Environment Programme in Thailand, overseeing disaster risk reduction policy for the region.

It was there that another part of the climate challenge became clear.

Policymakers understood the risks. Scientists had documented them. Communities were already experiencing them. Yet the capital required to respond was not moving at the necessary scale.

As Seldon later described it, “The missing piece was never the science. It’s financing.”

She eventually left policy to help build and scale climate-focused companies, including co-founding a net-negative infrastructure company centered on the adaptive reuse of historic buildings. Over time, her work increasingly moved toward the financial system itself.

If climate solutions already exist, the question was how to get enough capital behind them.

Investing across an interconnected planet

Seldon founded Pulse Fund in 2022 with a systems-based approach to climate investing.

Rather than treating power, transportation, and food systems as separate industries, Pulse invests across four connected areas: Energy Transition, Infrastructure, Food and Agriculture, and Mobility. The firm looks for the points where innovation in one can create opportunities across the others.

“The Earth is a single system. We believe silos will not decarbonize the planet. Cross-sector investment will.” — Pulse

In September 2026, Pulse announced the close of its inaugural $63 million fund, backing early-stage climate companies across those interconnected sectors.

Its portfolio includes companies such as Mast Reforestation, which works on post-wildfire reforestation and carbon removal; Twelve, which uses captured carbon dioxide to make fuels and other products; Endera, which develops electric commercial vehicles; Floodbase, which builds flood-monitoring and risk tools; and InventWood, which is developing engineered wood materials. 

This approach reflects the broader throughline in Seldon’s work: climate solutions will move at the scale required only when environmental value and economic value stop being treated as competing objectives.

Rethinking the number the world runs on

That thinking has led Seldon beyond investment decisions and into a much larger question about how economies measure success.

For nearly a century, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been one of the primary measures used to track the size and growth of national economies. But GDP measures economic output. It cannot tell whether that output strengthens the systems an economy depends on or depletes them.

“Gross domestic product measures activity, not value.”  —Tenzin Seldon

Rebuilding after a wildfire contributes to GDP. Extracting natural resources contributes to GDP. Increased healthcare spending caused by pollution contributes to GDP.

As Seldon wrote in Forbes, GDP can record all of these transactions without indicating whether an economy is building long-term wealth or consuming the assets that make future prosperity possible.

The limitation is not new. Economist Simon Kuznets, whose work helped establish modern national income accounting in the 1930s, cautioned against treating national income as a direct measure of human welfare.

Yet GDP became deeply embedded in financial markets, policymaking, lending, and international development.

Seldon is asking what would happen if economies measured something different.

From Gross Domestic Product to Gross Domestic Regeneration

Her answer is Gross Domestic Regeneration (GDR).

GDR begins with a different question. Instead of asking only how much an economy produced, it asks what that activity left stronger than before.

At the company level, Seldon has described GDR as a lens for evaluating whether a business regenerates or depletes the underlying assets on which it depends. Her framework considers the health of natural systems, the strength of communities, and the resilience of livelihoods and economic systems.

At a broader scale, she envisions the same principle being applied to economies.

Seldon has illustrated the concept through the example of two farms.

One farmer maximizes production year after year while stripping nutrients from the soil. Yields may remain high for a time, but eventually soil organic matter falls, water retention declines, and the productive capacity of the land deteriorates.

Another farmer produces food while rebuilding soil health. Over time, the farm becomes more resilient and more capable of supporting future production.

Traditional accounting is very good at measuring what both farms harvested this year. GDR asks what condition they will be in next year and in the decades that follow. 

That shift from output to capacity is central to Seldon’s thinking.

Measuring ecological, social, and economic regeneration

Seldon has outlined three interconnected dimensions of regeneration.

1. Ecological regeneration considers whether natural systems are recovering or declining, including indicators related to carbon, biodiversity, land, water, and other ecological assets.
2. Social regeneration considers the strength of communities, including whether prosperity is shared and whether the social systems supporting an economy are becoming more resilient.
3. Economic and capital regeneration considers whether an economy can withstand disruption, sustain livelihoods, and continue creating value without eroding the natural and social assets on which that value depends.

Importantly, Seldon does not treat these dimensions as independent.

Healthy ecosystems can reduce climate risk and resource pressures. Strong communities can support better environmental stewardship and create more stable conditions for investment. Economies capable of absorbing shocks can give both people and ecosystems greater space to recover.

In other words, regeneration compounds. So does depletion.

Putting regeneration on the economic balance sheet

Seldon formally introduced GDR to a global audience during Climate Week NYC in September 2026, describing it as a measure based on what economies protect and restore rather than simply what they produce. 

The framework enters a long-running global conversation about how to move beyond GDP. Bhutan's Gross National Happiness, the UN's environmental-economic accounting work, the Genuine Progress Indicator, and other efforts have all attempted to capture dimensions of prosperity that conventional economic statistics overlook.

GDR is still developing as a framework, including the methodology required to translate the concept into comparable measures for companies and economies. That next stage will determine how its ecological, social, and economic indicators are calculated and ultimately incorporated into real-world financial and policy decisions.

But Seldon's underlying proposition is clear.

If soil, forests, water, communities, and resilient infrastructure make economic activity possible, then drawing those systems down should not be mistaken for creating lasting wealth. Restoring them should also have measurable economic value.

Directing capital toward what comes next

Seldon's work connects two sides of the same challenge. Through Pulse Fund, she directs capital toward companies addressing climate change at scale. Through Gross Domestic Regeneration, she is asking whether the financial system is measuring the right things in the first place.

That persistence has taken her from watching a changing Himalayan landscape to helping decide where millions of dollars in climate capital will flow. Now, she is asking an even larger question of the global economy.

What if success were measured not only by how much we could produce today, but by how much capacity for life, prosperity, and resilience we could leave behind tomorrow?

“Urgency is actually quiet and consistent. It’s about showing up every single day to solve the same problem.” —Tenzin Seldon

In 2024, Tenzin Seldon joined One Earth’s Board of Directors, bringing her experience across climate policy, entrepreneurship, technology, and finance. Her systems approach reflects a principle central toOne Earth’s work: the climate and biodiversity crises cannot be solved in silos, and the solutions must be as interconnected as the systems they are designed to support.

As Seldon continues directing capital toward climate solutions and developing Gross Domestic Regeneration, her work asks a fundamental question: What if prosperity were measured not only by what we produce, but by what we leave stronger for the future?