The one vital climate solution leaders will avoid talking about at COP26

During the much-anticipated COP26 meetings in Glasgow, there will be one necessary climate solution missing from discussions: reducing our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by transforming our economic model.

Instead there will be talk of — and reliance on — risky, yet-to-be-proven-at-the-scale-required technologies and technologies that have not been invented that can save us from the emissions we continue to create in the name of economic growth. There will also be talk of the wonderful “green growth” that investment in renewable energy can generate. Anything, as long as there is growth.

Yet this much-prized economic growth is a key reason why we have released more GHG emissions since the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was released in 1990 than throughout all of human history prior. Despite 25 COP meetings over three decades, our annual global GHG emissions are 60% higher than in 1990.

This is because gross domestic product (GDP), the proxy for economic growth, is coupled with material footprint, including energy, and therefore any growth in GDP will require growth in energy.

We are seeing this now: rebounding after the COVID-19 pandemic, the International Energy Agency is forecasting 5% growth in global energy use in 2021 and 4% growth in global energy use in 2022, 40-45% of which will be generated by fossil fuel-based electricity generation. This will take emissions from the electricity sector to an all-time high.

Not only is economic growth a key cause of our GHG emissions, it’s also hampering our ability to reduce GHG emissions in line with science-based targets. Over the past 20 years enormous inroads have been made in deploying renewable energy — today we are producing 8 billion more megawatt hours of clean energy each year than in 2000. However, over the same time frame economic growth has caused energy needs to grow by 48 billion megawatt hours.

Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel sums it up nicely when he says growth keeps outstripping our best efforts to decarbonise. Furthermore, the biodiversity crisis is just as critical as the climate crisis. Deploying more technology will further increase our material footprint, negatively impacting on biodiversity. 

Growth is not only the root cause of our ecological crisis, but the key barrier to solving it.

Hickel is not alone in his concern. In November 2019, more than 11,000 scientists declared a climate emergency, and advised:

Our goals need to shift from GDP growth and the pursuit of affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving human well-being by prioritizing basic needs and reducing inequality.

More recently Giorgio Parisi, 2021 physics Nobel Prize laureate, echoed similar sentiments at a pre-COP26 meeting of parliamentarians in October. He advised:

The gross domestic product of individual countries is the basis of political decisions, and the mission of governments seems to be to increase GDP as much as possible, an objective that is in profound contrast with the arrest of climate change … If gross national product remains the center of attention, our future will be grim.

But don’t we need GDP growth to improve our lives? In short, no. Since the 1970s, increases in GDP have, on average, failed to translate into increases in well-being and happiness. It is entirely possible to live happy, healthy lives within smaller economies.

Robert F Kennedy eloquently summed up the inadequacy of GDP as a metric of well-being in a speech in 1968:

The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

Simon Kuznets, the Nobel prize-winning economist who designed the first GDP measure in 1934, cautioned that “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income”. GDP was never meant to be the metric of human welfare.

What could a world not solely focused on economic growth look like? It would be a world that takes climate action seriously by reducing emissions now, not relying on technology that does not exist to reduce emissions later.

We would cut our material footprint (including energy) of developed nations so it no longer exceeds planetary boundaries — of which we are overshooting six of the nine — and at the same time address the huge wealth and income inequalities across the globe.

Then developed nations will need to implement a deliberate set of strategies to meet the needs of all within the means of the planet — something which today’s economic model is failing at miserably. Doughnut economics is one way to do this.

What would it mean in substance to follow this approach?

According to Hickel, author of Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, it would essentially mean taking the best bits of life today forward — the advances in medical science, technologies needed to live a life of dignity and those to reduce emissions, and leaving the worst bits behind: polluting industries like coal and gas; armaments; red meat; fast fashion; air travel; planned obsolescence; too-large and too-inefficient homes; food waste; single-use plastics.

It would mean a reduction in advertising and shifting from “ownership” to “usership” as well as avoiding individual and corporate ownership where public ownership would suffice. It would involve having a 30-hour week so remaining jobs could be shared, and a government-led jobs-guarantee so that anyone who wanted work would have a job.

Simultaneously we would decommodify public goods and expand public services including healthcare, education, public transport, affordable housing, public libraries, parks, sports grounds and basic quotas of energy, water and internet.

The goals of doughnut economics align well with degrowth, and together show the profoundly positive possibilities of altering core assumptions around economic growth. Doughnut economics is a way of integrating social and ecological challenges into the heart of our economic system, an approach that sweetens the apparently bitter pill of degrowing Western economies.

Since 2017, the English economist Kate Raworth’s creative use of the metaphor of a doughnut for a fresh approach to economic development has captured imaginations in cities around the world. The metaphor conveys the necessity of designing economies in such a way that communities stay sandwiched inside the dough. Economic policy is guided by the goal of not falling below key essential social foundations into the hole in the middle, but not extending beyond the outer limits of the doughnut, the ecological ceiling that charts a safe operating space for humanity and the planet — a true sweet spot.

The doughnut economics framework is based on decades of scientific work on the planetary boundaries (which map the ecological ceiling) and the UN sustainable development goals (which map the social foundations). Interest in this approach tracks rapidly rising global interest in shifting economic development from a focus on sustainability to regeneration, a trajectory observable from the World Economic Forum in Davos to Indigenous communities.

Numerous city-based initiatives, as documented by the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, are trialling the application of doughnut economics for regenerative and distributive economies, from Amsterdam to Berlin and also in Regen initiatives in Melbourne (December 2020), Brisbane (July 2021) and Sydney (August 2021).

Life in this new economic framework would involve less work and more time together, less individual ownership and more sharing, less debt and more government services provided to everyone. It’s a “getting back to basics” approach with more time in nature doing things we enjoy with people we enjoy, less time working to pay for things that we don’t need or use very often.

Our lives will have more meaning because we will have a greater sense of community, cooperation and connection, rather than focusing on individualism and perpetually trying to find happiness through our next purchase, holiday or experience. We will value different things and define success differently. Life in a smaller economy does not need to mean a poorer lifestyle. Indeed, we could be richer for it.

While it would be reassuring to think we have the luxury of choice between the status quo and shrinking our economy, unfortunately we do not. Climate scientist Professor Kevin Anderson, co-author of Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven’t We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?, highlights that:

Whatever direction is chosen, the future will be a radical departure from the present. Societies may decide to instigate rapid and radical changes in their emissions at rates and in ways incompatible with the Zeitgeist, or climate change will impose sufficiently chaotic impacts that are also beyond the stability of the Zeitgeist.

The economy is a construct of human agency — it can, and should, be changed because the laws of nature are not negotiable. Leaders should treat the climate crisis with the urgency it deserves and implement policies to immediately reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, ensuring that the well-being of people and the planet are prioritised over and above the impact on GDP.