It feels like a significant shift is happening in world politics, only it is not the shift that environmentalists have hoped and worked for.
The planet is in crisis, but reading about the World Economic Forum in Davos you’d think it was a 19th-century crisis of nation states competing for resources, influence and power in a world without rules, on a planet of infinite resources and no limits on its capacity to absorb pollution.
Away from the braggadocio and pomp, the global economy grinds on, chewing up land, resources and nature, and spitting out waste and pollution on an epic scale.
Yes – the economy feeds and clothes us, it provides energy, public services and employment. But at least part of what is driving the current political turmoil is a failure to accept, and adapt, to ecological limits and to address rising global inequality.
Our economic system is entirely dependent on growth, or rising levels of income per capita: it is the singular obsession of neoliberal capitalism and all financial institutions. The environmental consequences are evident all around us if we choose to look, and the alarms are all flashing red.
Scientists now warn that we have breached seven of the nine planetary boundaries, including climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater quality, biogeochemical flows, and novel entities like plastic pollution. These boundaries define a “safe operating space” for humanity beyond which abrupt and irreversible environmental change is likely.
Furthermore, the WWF 2024 Living Planet Report shows a devastating 73 per cent average decline in monitored wildlife populations between 1970 and 2020. Humanity continues to use nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s biocapacity can regenerate. And if ecological systems can’t regenerate, they cease to function.
But how then do we reorganise our food systems so that we all have enough to eat? “Enough” is the key word here. Many ecological thinkers and even a few economists are now rallying behind the principle of “sufficiency”.
It requires a complete rethink of growth-based economics and challenges the consumption patterns and high levels of affluence in many developed countries. Sufficiency rejects the ideal of profit-maximisation and wealth acquisition for its own sake, beyond the reasonable threshold needed to ensure everyone has a decent standard of living.
At first glance, the concept of sufficiency is profoundly utopian, as it casts aside the principle of comparative advantage as a guide for what nations should produce. But even at a personal level, sufficiency is a challenge. Who decides what “enough” looks like? And how on Earth would we ever get agreement on what counts as “enough”?
These are strong objections. However, if we can’t agree on how to set limits on material resource use, we are bound to overshoot limits. Nature will set limits for us instead.
Nor can we rely on market mechanisms to do the job: markets can’t work on their own to regulate resource use unless they put a price on goods that reflects the true environmental and social cost of extracting and using them, which politicians will never do. Technological fixes don’t work in the long term due to the rebound effect and sometimes make things worse.
Nor will incremental efficiency gains bring us back into line with planetary boundaries. Relative decoupling – where the economy grows faster than its environmental impact – is no longer enough to restore ecological balance. We require absolute decoupling, where resource use and emissions decline in absolute terms even as wellbeing is maintained or improved. This is the only way to end the vicious cycle where energy consumption drives growth and growth drives energy consumption.
All of this suggests radical transformations of our social, political and economic institutions to realign our economies with a “safe and just” operating space, using, for example, the Doughnut Economics principle developed by Kate Raworth.
The key challenge is to build policy frameworks around per capita resource use and sink utilisation and to create novel ways of sharing our finite resources using personal carbon trading, ecological tax reforms, and utilising the three Rs: restraint, reuse and recycling as the guiding principles of a truly circular economy.
Finding the right balance between voluntary co-operation and hard limits on energy and resource use is a minefield that most politicians will run a mile from. If you thought the debates about carbon taxation were challenging, imagine having to introduce personal carbon trading, or energy rationing instead.
But if we don’t engage with these issues, we hand the decision-making back to those who already have the power to engage in resource-grabbing or climate delay for their own benefit. Now is exactly the time to be renegotiating and reframing the debate about climate action so that it respects the principle of equity, as well as ecological necessity.
- Sadhbh O’Neill is an environmental and climate policy researcher