Conor here: Perhaps what the authors call the “holy grail of environmental policy” (economic growth with less emissions) needs rethinking. Sooner than that they will have no choice as global warming will do the job if conflicts don’t happen, and the collapse will be imposed on us somehow. The European Central Bank, for example, announced last year that it is reasonable that extreme weather events could cause the GDP of the euro area to decrease by 5 percent by 2030. The question immediately arises as to whether it happens with some similarity to planned regression and unity or something else, and the first results do not look very promising.
By Marina Requena-i-Mora, Postdoctoral Researcher, Environmental Sociology, University of Sheffield; Autonomous University of Barcelona; and Dan Brockington, Icrea Research Professor at ICTA-UAB, Department of Private Law, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Originally published on The Conversation.
The holy grail of environmental policy is an economy that brings prosperity without requiring ever-increasing consumption of raw materials.
Increasing income while reducing environmental pressures depends on “reducing” energy emissions from economic growth. Other countries in the world economy are moving in the right direction.
But this good news can be misleading. Our new research takes a long-term (50 years) look at the economies of over 100 countries, as well as a long-term look at the UK economy (over 150 years). Our findings are less convincing.
We used the most up-to-date data with a measure called footprint material. This counts everything a country actually consumes – including the resources it takes from abroad to make its imports. To begin with the results have been positive: 25 countries appear to have withdrawn from decoupled growth – the UK among them. Their GDP keeps going up while their material consumption goes down.
But certain claims were raised in three ways. This does not mean that green growth is impossible – only that the evidence is very expensive.
1. Resource Usage Is Not Going Down Enough
The economy is not reaching the safe limits we need to work at. Imagine owing £50,000 on credit cards. Last year your debt increased by £5,000; this year it has only increased by £4,000. You are improving. But he continues to go into the hole every month, and the hole is already deep.
Marina Requena-i-Mora. Author’s data based on World Bank and UNEP IRP Global Material Flows Database
Researchers have estimated that an individual’s fair share of the world’s material would be between six and eight tons per year. The UK currently sits at more than double that range. Spain, Germany, Belgium are in the same place. Their lines in the chart bend downwards, but from such a high level that it is not yet time to call them success stories. In contrast, Cuba and Somalia – along with many other low- and middle-income countries – fall within the sustainable boundary, albeit at very low income levels.
2. There is no Global Turning Point
The overall picture for all 105 countries shows no change. As countries grow wealthier over time, resource consumption increases, especially at very high levels of income.
Marina Requena-i-Mora. Author’s data based on World Bank and UNEP IRP Global Material Flows Database.
Repeat the exercise year after year, from 1970 to today, and the same trend of upward bending returns. The promised drop never comes.
This suggests that the 25 success stories are no different than signs of a pattern that other countries may follow as they grow. They are not used as guidelines for the path we need to take. They are features that other countries may avoid.
Success also has many origin stories. Europe’s slowdown largely tracks the 2008 financial crash and subsequent housing boom, not a quiet technological revolution.
Some exporters are looking green because higher prices have boosted their GDP while domestic construction remains low. Cuba has kept material consumption low while GDP per capita has risen, through decades of agroecology and urban farming.
Taken together, these conditions do not reflect the kind of smooth technological development envisioned in green growth issues. The decline comes from different historical processes: the crisis, the housing boom, price effects, and special political choices, rather than a global shift to cleaner production.
3. A Dip Is Just a Blip
The third problem is time. Records for direct foot objects only go back to 1970. Britain has rich historical data on material consumption but also on trade, household spending and investment, and we used those to reconstruct the UK’s vital stamp from 1875. The clean curves you see when you start in 1990 disappear.
For almost a century and a half, the relationship between British income and resource consumption is a straight upward line. Current immersion has happened before. It may just be a layer of further parallel growth: a bump in the long upward climb.
Marina Requena-i-Mora. Figure based on data from Bank of England, UNEP IRP, Streeck et al. (2020), The Maddison Project
It is not that rich countries have done nothing. Real efforts have been made, and the latest lines in the chart are moving in the right direction. But what if they are wobbles, not curves. What if they don’t bring countries under safe borders? What if they are not effective models for other countries to follow?
To make real progress, countries that consume more than a fair, sustainable share of the world’s resources – the UK among them – need to reduce their consumption in absolute terms, not just reduce their growth. And it is possible: several countries, including Cuba and Somalia, have reduced material consumption while incomes have risen, within those limits.
How they handle it varies and requires close study, but it shows that the goal is realistic. The way forward is to measure growth and resource use more honestly – from far away places and against real limits.
