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Just how scarce are our gold reserves? Well, a group of scientists have set a date for the disappearance of the rare metal, and that is just 27 years away, in 2050. This is the opinion of the Center for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (CREAF-UAB) and of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). They have published a study in which they show that over the last century the extraction of rare and scarce minerals has doubled, a rate that may “involve environmental, economic, social and geopolitical risks”. Earth’s dwindling resources The work, which has been published by the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, points out that 70% of the elements in the periodic table needed to “ build the modern world of humans” are no longer found in biomass. That is, the elements used in the manufacture of sanitary products, train tracks, airplanes or smartphones. This is due, according to the scientists, to the fact that they require more chemical elements than those needed by planet Earth for there to be natural elements, such as leaves and tree trunks. This series of chemical elements for artificial objects — the scientific name is human elementome — is increasingly at variance with what is required by the biological elementome, that is, for nature. Biomass usage and an“increasingly complex and risky” process This process began in the 1900s, when humans switched “from using common materials such as clay, stone or lime, which are continually recycled in nature and in the atmosphere, to using many other elements, especially including those known as rare earths”, commented one of the authors of the study, Jordi Sardans, in statements collected by EFE . Humans used to need elements that came 80% from biomass, as indicated in the study. In 2005, this percentage was lowered to 32% and, in 2050, assuming we continue on the same path, they believe that it will continue to decrease to 20%. “We are going to a situation in which 80% of the elements we use are from non-biological sources,” warn the scientists. In this sense, another of the authors of the paper, UAB professor Jaume Terradas, has pointed out that “sustaining the human element will be increasingly complex and risky,” which will require “a more rational use of the Earth’s limited resources,” he added. Gold and other elements will run out by 2050 The extraction of elements such as gold, copper and silicon has skyrocketed in the 20th century due to the development and use of new technologies and clean energy sources. The annual growth of the consumption and extraction process is around 3%, according to the third of the study’s authors, Josep Peñuelas. According to him, “in this scenario it is possible that the reserves of some of these elements will be exhausted in 2050 — such as gold and antimony — or in less than 100 years — in the case of molybdenum and zinc.” Call for an end to ‘planned obsolescence’ This practice will have repercussions on our environment, as the more elements of the periodic table that are used, the more minerals will have to be extracted. A process that will mean increasing energy consumption and associated CO2 emissions. But the effects will not stop there, it will also be noticeable at the economic level, since the scarcity of elements entails a threat to their availability, especially in the poorest countries. And it will also hinder the production in rich countries. Therefore, the experts are calling for an end to what is known as ‘planned obsolescence’. This is a policy of producing consumer goods that rapidly become obsolete, one that has been applied for decades. And they also propose the development of new technologies that favor a more profitable use of materials that are becoming scarce.

We live in an age of mass consumption, fuelled by increasing production. We now have an ever-growing ‘anthroposphere’ – a term that encompasses everything that humans have created from raw materials, and how they subsequently interact with the planet. Such demand obviously puts significant strain on natural resources, but nowhere is this issue more profound than with the critical minerals which underpin the energy transition. This increasing demand for raw materials, particularly ‘critical minerals’, is reflected in the energy transition. Let’s take a closer look at these critical minerals, the energy transition and potential solutions to this rising demand! Critical minerals include copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt and rare earth elements, named so because they hold significant economic influence over strategically important sectors, including clean energy technologies. A recent report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) explores the role of critical minerals in the energy transition. It highlights the key part these minerals must play, given that renewable energy technologies require far more minerals to build than fossil-fuel technologies. The report highlights that as more and more renewables come onto the system, the average amount of minerals required for a new unit of power generation has increased by 50%, as seen in the graph below. How are they used in renewable energy technologies? Different technologies require different minerals, but broadly the IEA highlights that: Lithium, Nickel, Cobalt, Manganese and Graphite are all critical for battery technologies. Rare earth elements, such as neodymium and dysprosium, are vital in the creation of magnets that underpin the functioning of wind turbines and electric vehicle motors. Solar Panels require large quantities of silicon and copper. Copper and aluminium are also essential for the expansion of electricity networks to accommodate more renewables. How much is demand expected to grow? The increase in demand for these critical minerals is obviously dependent on how many renewables we bring onto the system, which in itself is dependent on policy support, investment and grid constraints. The IEA highlight that if there were to be a concerted effort to meet the Paris Agreement – which is keeping temperatures well below a 2° rise, this would mean “a quadrupling of mineral requirements for clean energy technologies by 2040”. The need for greater circularity This increase in demand for critical minerals to support the energy transition will put significant pressure on sources of these minerals, and how we extract them from the earth through mining – so how can we alleviate this? One way is through greater ‘circularity’. What is circularity and why do we need it? Circularity, or the circular economy, can be defined as: “a system which aims to get the most out of materials, keep products and materials in use and design them to be cycled back into the economy and eliminate waste” The first case for greater circularity of critical minerals is that the mining and processing practices associated with extracting these materials are at the detriment of the natural environment. This is both from the destruction of natural habitats to create the mine, but also the pollution of soils and groundwater from leached chemicals. The reliance on mining for new sources of critical minerals to fuel the energy transition is therefore ironically at odds with stricter environmental regulation. Beyond the environmental impacts associated with mining, it is also frequently associated with negative social impacts. This is both from the health impacts of the pollution, but also the race for greater extraction is related to frequent abuses of human rights for those involved in the mining. We considered these particular impacts on indigenous populations in a recent article, check it out. One such example is the mining of Cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which produces more than 70% of the world’s supply. In which, there are frequent reports that have emerged of child labour, fatal accidents and violent clashes between mining groups. This closely relates to an article we have already done, which looks more closely at the injustices associated with oil extraction in the DRC – be sure to have a look. Cobalt mining in the DRC: Source. In addition to the negative effects associated with mining, there is a huge case for circularity in that simply put, these are finite resources which will, one day, be exhausted. One article highlights that without measures being taken, “the rapidly growing demand for magnet rare earths […] might exceed their supplies in the next two decades”. Finally, such reliance on these critical minerals, which are only found and processed in specific geographic locations, presents significant supply chain vulnerabilities. We only need to look at COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine to understand just how susceptible our supply chains can be to external shocks. The critical mineral supply chain vulnerability is evident in the fact that the EU only supplies 1% of raw materials used in renewable energy technologies, presenting a significant exposure to external influences. Implementing greater circularity of critical minerals that are already in use therefore reduces this exposure and increases energy security – a critical issue. It’s clear that there are many adverse reasons to rely solely upon extraction as a source of critical minerals, and this is where we can look to methods of circularity to keep critical minerals in use.

“When we stop thinking about what is around us, we become complicit in what is happening to us. We have to come to terms with our place in the world and do something about it.” – Simone Weill We live in a world obsessed with the ideology of growth. Tim Jackson calls it, “The myth of our time, the myth that gives meaning to our existence”. We create brands to grow and as long as they grow, we are secure. In this framework, the opposite of growth is collapse and obscurity. But growth can also become an untenable weight to bear. Timothée Parrique compares growth to the absurd myth of Sisyphus, a heavy stone that we are condemned to drag up the mountain again and again, and which inexorably falls, causing crisis after crisis. For many years, branding just ignored this state of affairs. Purpose orientation for the benefit of the world is a relatively recent development. When I started working in the branding world more than 20 years ago, almost all strategies were formulated more or less as follows: “In a hyper-competitive and supply-saturated world, only (my brand) offers (unique benefit) to (my brand’s consumer)”. This framework assumes that the world (i.e. the market) is full of permanently dissatisfied consumers who have to be seduced and that there is a fierce competition for their attention. It does not question the logic of the system. It pursues the growth of the most profitable projects and excels in zero-sum competition, in other words, in being chosen. We are living the consequences of a system dependent on the logic of relentless growth and dissatisfaction. There are figures that speak volumes. Since Steve Jobs launched the iPhone in 2007, Apple has sold more than a billion mobile phones and never seems to have enough. The growth of the brand is chasing an addiction to technology that is already known as the second pandemic of the century. The sector is also notorious for unfair labour practices and for causing a huge amount of electronic waste. The role of branding has been to hide all the nasties by offering a luxurious front end in all means of brand expression: the famous Apple shops, the communication, the customer service and the user and shopping experience, not to mention the psychological dependence on their own products that gets us hooked for life. Fortunately, we are waking up. It is time to develop new myths, better stories and a sharper vision. This is as essential as understanding the dynamics of collapse. To live well, within the limits of a finite planet, we need a vision of social progress that is better than the one implicit in the growth myth. Degrowth proposes a voluntary transition to a just, participatory and ecologically sustainable society and implies a profound economic transformation. It means breaking with the logic that more is always better. We know that we have exceeded the limits of what the earth is capable of regenerating and that it is impossible to “decouple” what is good for the environment from what is good for the economy. If we were to take seriously the IPCC’s warnings that we must halve emissions by 2030 if we are not to unleash Armageddon, we must see the environment and economy as inherently connected. Either we produce more or we pollute less. It is possible to achieve greater efficiency in the use of resources but there is always a rebound effect of greater consumption (Jevons paradox). Green growth is a utopia that distracts and delays the real actions that need to be taken. Degrowth implies a change of values, a new meaning of success. Instead of accumulating more money, the aim is to create healthier social bonds in order to reach a post-growth society in which the economy remains stable. In a post-growth society there will be income limits, universal basic services, reduced working time and democratic ownership of enterprises. Degrowth means moving away from unsustainable activities and aiming for sufficiency rather than just efficiency. What is enough for our needs? If we consume fewer brands, reduce demand and production, can we stop saturating the market with brands or products and services we don’t need? Will we be able to do deep debranding work, an honest branding contribution to an economic vision that pursues a good life for all within planetary boundaries? Will companies hire us to help them deactivate brands so that less work is done in companies, people get time back, stress is reduced and our health improves?

(Peter D. Burdon is Associate Professor at Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide, Australia. James Martel is Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University, USA. “THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF LAW AND THE ANTHROPOCENE.” Routledge. 2023)//PWD

Humans are currently expanding our ecological niche with extraordinary efectivity, out-competing all other charismatic life for access to metabolic resources. And it’s going terribly.The current global warming of 1.2˚C above pre-industrial levels already produces catastrophes the world over, catastrophes that will be manyfold worse within a short space of time. Even in rich countries! As an exceptional late 2021 Guardian article has it,“The Climate Disaster Is Here” and though we are “tumbling down a painful, worsening rocky slope rather than about to suddenly hit a sheer clif edge … the world’s governments are currently failing to avert a grim fate” (Milman,Witherspoon, Liu, and Chang 2021). Meanwhile,a leaked early draft of IPCC working group III’s 6th assessment report explained in matter-of-fact tones:“Global emissions in 2030 as projected on a continuation of current policies exceed current national pledges” (Leaked 2021, 11–24).8 In other words, most of our public narratives about global heating – which are structured as though national pledges were on track to being achieved – are nonsense at their core.This is no surprise. At no point have any of the major carbon-emitting countries implemented policies that would result in the 1.5˚C hotter-than-pre-industrial world imagined in the Paris climate agreement, nor even in the 2˚C hotter world grudgingly assumed by that agreement. Matters are still worse, however: “Current pledges are not consistent with long-term emission pathways that would likely limit global warming to 2˚C during the 21st century” (Leaked 2021, 11–25).We are not on track to stay within the bounds of our worst best-case scenario, itself nearly twice as bad 83 Ira Allen as emissions-driven current global heating.To get on the worst best-case track, global carbon emissions would need to somehow peak by 2025, shortly after this essay appears in print.The very notion seems fanciful. Moreover, to report on “what is” is to say little of signifcant further global heating feedback loops.Associated with albedo loss from glacial and sea-ice melt, the release of methane trapped in permafrost, or changes in earth’s core climate gradients, such as the polar jet stream and Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Caesar et al. 2021), these blow our rosier dark projections out of the water. Nor does this speak to the related but distinct global biodiversity loss that Elizabeth Kolbert chillingly termed The Sixth Extinction. In Kolbert’s most recent work, Under a White Sky, she notes in passing that “extinction rates are now hundreds – perhaps thousands – of times higher than the so-called background rates that applied over most of geologic time” (Kolbert 2021, 74). And it’s not just vertebrates.“Even among insects, a class long thought to be extinction-resistant, numbers are plunging. Whole ecosystems are threatened, and the losses have started to feed on themselves” (74). We did that, and not just the “we” of the wealthy countries. And we did it before even starting to cook ourselves and our nonhuman kin in a carbon-saturated atmosphere and ocean system. Most of the great making-die to date isn’t even about heating due to human carbon spend: it’s about the land- and sea-use patterns our emissions enable, fruits of an extraordinary and ever-expanding capacity for resource metabolization. All of this should be understood as a broadly human construction of a global species-niche, though of course, an expansion accomplished at extraordinary cost to most of humanity itself. By dint of interactions between historically very particular forms of human activity and extrahuman physical regularities, between 1970 and 2016 the population of human animals doubled and managed to force an average 68% drop across the populations of all nonhuman vertebrates: killing mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fsh by indiscriminate billions upon billions upon billions (WWF 2020, 6). Our mechanism of action for this wholesale devastation was primarily environmental use patterns, not carbon emissions. From clear-cutting rainforests to deep-sea trawling, capitalism’s requirement of infnite expansion has led us toward both brute-force and cleveringenuity methods for reconstructing the partial ecological niches our species occupied somewhat more placidly for millennia. Climate change due to our “release” of carbon by burning fossil fuels has certainly contributed to our casual massacre of most of the earth’s non-domesticated biomass, but the unsurvivable heating, sea-level rise and acidifcation, and destructive weather intensifcation of anthropogenic climate change have barely even come into play yet.

Overshooting the Earth System thus means that the supply sources, activity spaces and disposal sites are overused (Catton, 1982, 1998). According to Rees (2021) overshoot is “a meta-problem, the cause of most so-called ‘environmental problems’ including climate change [...]. Climate change is therefore only a symptom of overshoot, implying that only reducing carbon emissions, the cause of anthropogenic global warming, will not solve all environmental problems.” The neo-Malthusian problem has become one, not of scarcity of some particular resource, food, or of too much carbon emissions, but of the entire human “ecological footprint” which is too large, and causes an overshoot. The term ecological footprint was introduced by Wackernagel and Rees (1996). Hoekstra and Wiedmann (2014, p.1114) describe an ecological footprint as an indicator “of human pressure on the environment and form the basis for understanding environmental changes that result from this pressure (such as land-use changes, land degradation, reduced river flows, water pollution, climate change) and resultant impacts (such as biodiversity loss or effects on human health or economy).” They distinguish seven types of ecological or environmental footprints: land, energy, water, materials, carbon, nitrogen, and biodiversity footprints - and state that the carrying capacity of the Earth system in terms of carbon, energy, land, material, and water has been exceeded (Hoekstra and Wiedmann, 2014). Measuring the carrying capacity of Earth systems and determining whether a particular environmental footprint is exceeding this, which would signal overshoot, has resulted in the development of the concept of “planetary boundaries” (Rockstr¨om et al., 2009). Nine planetary boundaries have been identified. These are climate change, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, global freshwater use, land systems change, rate of biodiversity loss, atmospheric aerosol loading and chemical pollution (Rockstr¨om et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015). Rockstr¨om et al. (2009) estimated that at least three of the planetary boundaries have been exceeded: “for climate change, rate of biodiversity loss, and changes to the global nitrogen cycle” (Rockstr¨om et al., 2009, p.1). While in itself problematic, the bigger danger is that the breach of only a few planetary boundaries can potentially lead to the entire Earth system tipping, resulting in “abrupt global environmental change.” This is due to the interdependence between the various planetary boundaries and non-linear feedback effects between them, which implies that there could be potential climate tipping points, 11 or thresholds, which if exceeded, may cause the tipping of the Earth system into a state which would be detrimental to civilization and life (Rockstr¨om et al., 2009; Lenton et al., 2019; Ritchie et al., 2021). It threatens societal collapse, and even poses an existential risk (Richards et al., 2021). “The prospect of civilization collapse has now entered the mainstream of scientific and popular discourse” (Gowdy, 2020, p.2). Climate change, which through a cascade of breached tipping points could cause a megahothouse, is considered an existential threat for several reasons (Kemp et al., 2022). One is that global warming directly threatens agriculture and food supply. According to Gowdy (2020, p.2) “Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible.” He refers here to the fact that climates have been comparatively stable over the past 12,000 years (the Holocene) which allowed human societies to switch from hunting and gathering to large scale farming. A second reason why breaching planetary boundaries could pose an existential threat is that environmental change is implicated in all past mass extinction events (Kemp et al., 2022). Song et al. (2021, p.1) points out that mass species extinction12 in the past have been associated with tipping points in climate change of >5.2 degrees Celsius magnitudes. Bradshaw et al. (2021) and Dirzo et al. (2022) consider the current rate of biodiversity loss to be so significant that it signifies that humans have triggered the planet’s sixth mass extinction. A growing number of authors and scientists indeed warn that a sixth mass extinction may be beginning or imminent - e.g. Barnosky et al. (2011), Cowie et al. (2022), Kaiho (2022), Kolbert (2014) and McCallum (2015). Other reasons that have been cited for the breaching of planetary boundaries as existential threat, is that environmental collapse, say due to climate change, or water scarcity, or biodiversity loss, could cause global conflict, could increase vulnerability to other shocks, cause systemic crises, and reduce humanity’s ability to recover from other catastrophes (Kemp et al., 2022). Thus, economic growth has lead humanity to overshoot the capacity of the Earth system, and this poses an existential risk. This is why Rees (2021) has described overshoot as “ultimately a fatal condition.”The existential risk is increasing given that the extent of overshooting is increasing13 and shows no sign of diminishing, as measured for instance by the Material Footprint (MF) / Raw Material Consumption (RMC) indicator (Fanning et al., 2022; Giljum et al., 2015; Wiedmann et al., 2015).

CONTEXT NOTE: The doughnut combines two core concepts: (1) an ecological ceiling that avoids critical planetary degradation, which is informed by the planetary boundaries framework for Earth-system stability; and (2) a sufficient social foundation that avoids critical human deprivation, which is closely aligned with the 12 social priorities of the Sustainable Development Goals. The doughnut visualizes the goal of meeting the needs of all people within the means of the living planet

Overall, we find no evidence that any country is currently moving towards the doughnut-shaped safe and just space. Current trends are likely to deepen the climate and ecological crisis while failing to eliminate social shortfalls. Despite decades of sustainable development rhetoric, countries with high levels of social achievement have levels of resource use far beyond anything that could be sustainably extended to all people, and their extent of ecological overshoot has generally been increasing. Although low-income countries have shown progress in reducing social shortfalls, they have generally been transgressing biophysical boundaries faster than they have been achieving social thresholds. The slow rate of social progress is coupled with ecological overshoot at the global scale, which is already overwhelming the regenerative capacity of the biosphere35 and exposing humanity to a high risk of destabilizing the Earth system4 . Previous research has shown the unsustainability of current development trajectories18,37. Where the doughnut provides new insights is that it contains plural and non-substitutable goals for which absolute (not relative) performance matters, both socially and ecologically. Building on the doughnut, our analysis shows that past, current and business-as-usual future levels of resource use associated with meeting basic needs are too high. To meet the needs of all people within planetary boundaries, current relationships between social performance and biophysical resource use must be radically transformed in all countries, albeit in different country-specific ways depending on the extent of social shortfall and ecological overshoot2,21,38. For wealthy countries with high ecological overshoot, resource use needs to be dramatically reduced to get within fair shares of biophysical boundaries—a transition that is unlikely to be accomplished with efficiency improvements alone39. It may also require post-growth and degrowth policies that redesign current growth-dependent economic systems and reduce the overconsumption of resources directly40,41. Simulation models have shown that it is possible for wealthy countries to improve social outcomes without growth by reducing inequality and prioritizing social provisioning16,24. Given our finding that current trends in collective social indicators, such as social support, democratic quality and equality, are most in need of transformation, and given that these social indicators are only weakly coupled to resource use2 , there is broad scope to improve them by transforming provisioning systems in non-materialistic ways (for example, by distributing income more fairly and universalizing access to basic goods and services). However, a growing body of research shows that such transformations must confront powerful industries and other vested interests that benefit from the unequal and extractive status quo both within and across countries42

The world scientific consensus, as represented by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has established that the global average temperature needs to be kept below a 1.5°C increase over pre-industrial levels this century—or else, with a disproportionately higher level of risk, “well below” a 2°C increase—if climate destabilization is not to threaten absolute catastrophe as positive feedback mechanisms come into effect. In the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6, released in its various parts over 2021–23), the most optimistic scenario is one of an end-of-the-century increase in global average temperature over pre-industrial levels of below 1.5°C. This requires that the 1.5°C boundary not be crossed until 2040, rising by a tenth of a degree to 1.6°C, and then falling near the end of the century back down to a 1.4°C increase. All of this is predicated on reaching net zero (in fact, real zero) carbon emissions by 2050, which gives a fifty-fifty chance that the climate-temperature boundary will not be exceeded.

Yet, according to leading climate scientist Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, this scenario is already out of date. It is now necessary, based on the IPCC’s own figures, to reach the zero-carbon dioxide emissions point by 2040, in order to have the same 50 percent chance of avoiding a 1.5°C increase. “Starting now,” Anderson wrote in March 2023, to not exceed 1.5°C of warming requires 11% year-on-year cuts in emissions, falling to nearer 5% for 2°C. However, these global average rates ignore the core concept of equity, central to all UN climate negotiations, which gives “developing country parties” a little longer to decarbonise. Include equity and most “developed” nations need to reach zero CO2 emissions between 2030 and 2035, with developing nations following suit up to a decade later. Any delay will shrink these timelines still further.

GDP puts a value on economic activities, but doesn’t consider whether they are exhausting or replenishing natural resources. Eli Fenichel, Knobloch Family Professor of Natural Resource Economics at the Yale School of the Environment, led efforts to get the government on track to account for the use of natural capital and integrate that data into decision-making. An aerial photo of a forest with a house in the middle Valentin Flauraud/AFP via Getty Images) Eli Fenichel Knobloch Family Professor of Natural Resource Economics, Yale School of the Environment Interview conducted and edited by Ted O’Callahan March 21, 2023 Q: You recently returned to Yale after taking a leave to work in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where you led a 27-agency team that developed the National Strategy to Develop Statistics for Environmental-Economic Decisions. What is the National Strategy and why is it important? First, just to be absolutely clear, I’m speaking as a Yale professor now, not someone representing the administration. My comments reflect how I understand the strategy in my current position. We know that natural resources, including things like a stable climate, biodiversity, water, soil, wetlands, and forests, are a key part of the country’s economic health. The environment contributes to our national welfare, to our productivity, to our wellbeing. Yet the core national statistical system that produces numbers like the GDP and unemployment doesn’t currently collect environmental data. The National Strategy to Develop Statistics for Environmental-Economic Decisions is a roadmap to begin accounting for natural capital. Over a 15-year period, the strategy will add environmental data to the U.S. federal balance sheet and eventually develop associated, relevant statistics for decision-making. Ultimately the goal is to get environmental decision-making onto the same track with economic decision-making. Currently, we treat environment and economics as separate spheres. Once decisions are made in each area, we hope we can work out conflicts after the fact. That isn’t effective or realistic. Instead, the National Strategy aims to provide the information needed to allow for a single, fluid decision-making process. Q: Would you offer an example of why the change is needed? After a hurricane or wildfire, GDP goes up in the next quarter. Ecosystems have been damaged or destroyed, yet we’re counting the impacts as positive economic growth. Rebuilding leads to the GDP growth but it’s possible because we are pulling money out of the nation’s savings account. A big part of our savings account comes from our natural resources, and we don’t have a way to track when we’re drawing it down. We’ve known for a long time that the indicators that we’re currently collecting aren’t useful for some decisions. They don’t give us everything we might want, especially when we think about our natural wealth or our future opportunities. If we had been accounting for our natural assets all along, we’d probably have seen signals of the economic impacts of climate change much earlier. In fact, the system of national accounts already says we’re supposed to account natural resources under the category of non-produced, non-financial biological assets. We’ve never done that. One part of the National Strategy is simply to produce the data we’ve long said we will. You can imagine a scenario where we extract and burn a bunch of fossil fuels. That adds to the GDP. Then we spend a bunch of money pulling that carbon out of the atmosphere. That also adds to the GDP. Do we want to depend entirely on an indicator that suggests making a mess and cleaning it up is economic progress? However, in addition, our ability to observe the earth and its systems has evolved at such a rapid pace over the last decade, even over the last five years. As has our ability to collect and organize data. This effort will provide an incredibly helpful tool for addressing climate change because it enables us to think about how climate impacts work their ways through natural capital. Hopefully, 15 years from now, we will have a dozen or so classes of natural assets on the balance sheet as core national statistics that are produced at a regular interval so we can understand how our natural wealth is changing over time. Q: What becomes possible when we have both GDP numbers and natural-capital statistics? GDP was developed to give us a bird’s-eye view of the economy. But the picture offered by GDP doesn’t tell us whether growth occurred because we were more productive, more creative, and more innovative—things that support future growth—or because we cut down forests, drained wetlands, fished out fish stocks, and burned a lot of coal—things that are, in effect, cashing out assets and could make future growth harder. You can imagine a scenario where we extract and burn a bunch of fossil fuels. That adds to the GDP. Then we spend a bunch of money pulling that carbon out of the atmosphere. That also adds to the GDP. Do we want to depend entirely on an indicator that suggests making a mess and cleaning it up is economic progress? If GDP is, in effect, a one-dimensional overview, adding natural-capital statistics could be thought of as providing depth perception. Without natural-capital statistics, we’re missing out on a big signal, and it has become a real concern, particularly if you think about how much the stability of our overall climate matters for future productivity. Beyond that, climate change and biodiversity loss are such large directional changes that they can no longer be thought of as simple shocks to the system that will get averaged out over time. It’s highly likely that our important economic estimates are becoming biased. Taken all together, the changes in the wealth we hold in nature are large enough that they are affecting broader economic estimates. Without good environment data, we can no longer think about economic issues clearly. Q: To clarify, the data around natural capital will be information, not a decision. That is correct. Think about it this way: we talk about GDP all the time, but I can’t think of any decision that hinges completely on GDP. Natural-capital statistics will provide another set of information that speaks to national economic opportunities going forward. It is probably not super correlated with GDP. And it will be valuable to have a set of national statistics that specifically speaks to national resources and the environment. But, again, national statistics are not decisions. However, they are go-to information sets. Q: How will the data be used? The goal is to support many different areas of decision-making, ranging from economic policy and sustainable development policy through to regulatory and programmatic decisions of the federal government. It will also support decisions by regional, state, local, and tribal governments, and other local authorities that are already using national statistical data to do economic planning. When planners create regional development plans, the models populate their data sets from national account statistics. Currently, to the extent they try to consider the environment, they’re attempting to bolt on an ad hoc, mismatched set of data. The National Strategy specifically anticipates developing natural-capital data that is aligned with the way we think about economic data. When the environment and economic data going into these models are designed to work together, we wind up with very different decision-making processes. Q: What about other sectors? In terms of the private sector and financial markets, there’s a really strong intersection with all of the work that’s happening in ESG. Part of the reason why there are something like 999 different ways of doing ESG right now is that there’s not a national account benchmark. Establishing a national benchmark that clarifies what information to collect and how to organize and report it will help firms assessing and reporting their own natural-capital dependencies, opportunities, and liabilities. Developing countries have started thinking about what natural-capital accounting could mean for sovereign debt markets. The IMF has been talking a lot about what are called debt-for-nature swaps, basically having countries commit to securing natural capital in exchange for debt relief. The logical extension of those ideas within the U.S. might be municipal bond markets or potentially even corporate debt markets going forward. When municipalities that are acting to protect their natural resources get better municipal bond rates, that leads to different incentives. Finally, companies can look at reported natural-capital statistics for thinking about supply-chain risks related to nature. Q: Would you give some examples? The food industry is quite concerned about pollinators. There’s also a lot of interest in soil fertility as a capital asset. Companies entering into long-term contracts want to know that farmers are treating the soil in a way that ensures it can keep producing. It’s a supply-chain and sourcing risk. Water is an issue for agriculture, industry, and water utilities. Again, one of the strengths of the National Strategy is that it recognizes that we need to get all of this organized in a way that’s comparable to the economic data. Years ago, I wrote a paper looking at the asset value of fish in the Gulf of Mexico. Normally anything having to do with fisheries is very contentious. But since the paper put environmental and economic information into the same frame, a federal regulator, an environmental NGO, and the commercial fisherman’s association all said, “This is exactly what we need.” Once all the decision factors were in the same unit, they all wound up seeing the numbers as credible and useful. I had a similar experience working on groundwater in Kansas, where some decision makers think about water in a volumetric unit—acre feet or gallons—while others think about it in terms of money. Getting everyone to use the same units allowed for amazingly rich conversations. It wasn’t telling people what they needed to do. It wasn’t saying, “This number’s high or this number’s low.” It was simply letting the different stakeholders speak the same language. For me, it clicked: this is the value of academic research. By providing information in a way that they hadn’t gotten it before, we helped people who really understand the system innately because they’re in it every day think about their decisions in a more sophisticated way. They could talk productively with people who had a different perspective. Q: Why will it take 15 years to produce these statistics? Part of why the plan allows for 15 years is that there’s quite a bit of work to organize all of those data, test it out, and refine it. To develop the statistic requires bringing people from multiple fields together to effectively backwards engineer the way that natural systems work. The United States is a large country with a lot of very different ecosystems. We want to understand what changes to ecosystems mean for those ecosystems and how that matters for people. We want to get a handle on it in a really deep way so that we can find a finite number of data points to collect and a finite number of statistics to produce that let us effectively integrate environmental and economic decisions. Looking for more insights? Sign up to get our top stories by email. Email The goal is to understand the processes of natural systems and their interactions with the economy clearly enough to think about the net present value of future services provided. To get there we have to figure out which ecosystem services to count. Then do we consider just the net present value of future services that involve an actual cash value—a transaction? Or do we also include avoided expenditures? Costs that would arise if the service weren’t there? What about green spaces that are effectively in-kind services? How do those fit? This work is already happening around specific issues. In the western United States, they’re doing it around water resources. In coastal areas there’s work on changing wetlands and sea-level rise. There’s work on soil, on forests. These are all things that can affect our national economic progress. With the National Strategy, rather than approach this region by region and problem by problem, we will standardize the way we collect and organize environmental data.

(BMJ. The BMJ is a weekly peer-reviewed medical trade journal, published by the trade union the British Medical Association. “Perhaps only degrowth can save us”. BMJ. 04 July 2023.

We are failing to mount the response we need to avoid catastrophe from the crisis in climate and nature. If governments continue with the same environmental policies currently in place, the world will become 2.8°C hotter by the end of the century, which would be “a death sentence,” warned the United Nations Secretary General in April. If the feedback loops kick in—for example, the release of methane from beneath melting ice—it could be much worse and much faster. We need drastic change—and a move to degrowth may be the only answer.

The economics textbook solution to externalities is to internalize them. If we could devise a way to price CO2 emissions, which account for the lion’s share of greenhouse gases, they could be inserted into the market mechanism. Broadly speaking, there are two ways to price carbon emissions. The first, and most intuitive, is to introduce a Pigouvian tax on carbon emissions.10 In plain language: you pollute, you pay. As of April 2021, twenty-seven countries in the world have implemented such forms of carbon taxation. As an alternative, it is possible to exploit the tight link between demand, supply, and prices by implementing a “cap-and-trade” system, building on the seminal work of economist Ronald Coase. The idea is to set a maximum level of CO2 emissions allowed per year for the entire system (the “cap”), then auction or dispense emissions permits (called allowances) among polluting firms, who can then proceed to trade these permits among themselves. Under cap-and-trade, a company must buy a permit to emit CO2, and can do so either from the government or from other firms. This might sound like the kind of abstract system that could only exist in economics textbooks but it is already widely used around the world. The EU has a cap-and-trade solution known as the Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), and so do New Zealand, Switzerland, Australia, South Korea, Kazakhstan, and China, to name just a few.11 Such schemes also exist at subnational level, as for example in California, Ontario, and the Tokyo region of Japan. These two alternatives, cap-and-trade (covering the entire economy) and carbon tax, are broadly equivalent. Either can achieve the same carbon prices and raise the same amount of revenue for a government. There are, however, some differences. One complication with cap-and-trade is price fluctuation; given that permits are auctioned and firms are allowed to trade them, the carbon price is subject to market dynamics, no less than a stock trading on Wall Street. For firms trying to decide whether to make large, long-term investments in green production methods, a nonfixed price introduces uncertainty regarding returns, weakening the incentive to proceed. Administratively, a cap-and-trade system is also more cumbersome to set up, especially for developing countries with limited administrative capacities. Once such a system is up, however, it is relatively easy to operate. In several countries, political considerations have steered policymakers toward cap-and-trade, given that any new tax was bound to be unpopular. To the public, cap-and-trade is a less visible mechanism than a carbon tax.12 For a good example of the difficult politics of carbon pricing, we need only look to the United States—the second-largest CO2 emitter in the world, after China, and conspicuously absent from the above list of carbon-pricing jurisdictions (at least at the national level). In 2009, the United States came close to adopting the federal cap-and-trade program specified by the American Clean Energy and Security Act (also known as the Waxman- Markey Bill), but it failed to pass in Congress. There is still some cause for hope given who currently leads the US Treasury. Secretary Janet Yellen spearheaded a petition supporting a carbon tax in 2019 which was signed by more than thirty-six hundred economists, including all living former chairs of the Federal Reserve, twenty-seven Nobel laureates, and fifteen former chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers.13 The problem, however, is that climate mitigation has become a strongly partisan issue in the United States. Given that filibuster rules in the Senate call for super-majorities, and the moderate democrats known as “blue dogs” remain coldhearted toward carbon pricing, it is hard to believe that Congress will pass carbon-pricing legislation in the near future. In Chapter 1, we saw that greenhouse gas emissions have been abating in advanced economies over the past few decades, but at a pace that is not sufficient to achieve net zero by mid-century. The problem goes well beyond the failures of politics in Washington. In 2017, a high-level commission on carbon pricing, co-chaired by Joseph Stiglitz and Lord Nicholas Stern, concluded that to keep global warming well below two degrees Celsius, in line with the Paris Agreement, a carbon price of $40 to $80 per ton of CO2 would be needed by 2020, and $50 to $100 per ton by 2030. In 2019, the IMF estimated the global average carbon price at around $2 per ton. It is simply not sufficient to put in place carbon tax schemes or cap-and-trade mechanisms. What matters is that the level of carbon pricing be set high enough and applied to wide parts of the economy—ideally, all of them. In mid-2021, the carbon price in the EU ETS broke the $50 mark —in principle, not far from the Stiglitz-Stern recommended levels. The EU ETS, however, currently covers only emissions from industry, the power sector, and intra-EU flights, which add up to roughly 45 percent of total EU emissions. On top of this, roughly half the allowances are given out for free. The degrowth school interprets this as capitalism’s inherent inability to shift away from greenhouse gas emission. In reality, there has simply been too low a price incentive to do so, reflecting too low of a political priority placed on this goal. Going forward, even where carbon pricing mechanisms are in place, the screws will need to be significantly tightened to accelerate decarbonization sufficiently to reach carbon neutrality by mid-century. Another policy action required to accelerate the green transition is the elimination of fossil-fuel subsidies, and related tax exemptions, as rapidly as possible. These subsidies amplify the negative externalities associated with CO2 emissions, and even create implicit incentives to produce them. According to recent estimates, global fossil-fuel subsidies remain large, at $5.9 trillion (6.8 percent of global GDP) in 2020, with the subsidizer-in- chief being China ($2.2 trillion), followed by the United States ($660 billion) and Russia ($520 billion).14 Allowing carbon pricing and fossil-fuel subsidies to coexist is essentially taking two steps forward and one step back in the march toward decarbonization. This is something that ambitious net-zero targets cannot afford. Abolishing fossil-fuel subsidies would not only lift the drag on decarbonization, it would free up precious financial resources to further accelerate the green transition.

The fourth step this SI proposes as a means towards spatialising degrowth is the acknowledgement and systematic documentation of the role that insurgent urban experts and professionals can play in promoting degrowth agendas. This category includes architects, designers, planners, academics, care workers, teachers, technology and IT experts, medical and care professionals, who can link degrowth agendas to everyday spatialised practices of building, caring, mobility, education, etc. Schismenos et al. (2020) use the term ‘cosmolocalism’ to describe local experts who develop locally but distribute globally the technologies and practices that prioritise socio-ecological well-being over corporate profits. We argue that these overlooked insurgent professionals can enrich and facilitate the work of social movements in enacting change and in reshaping ‘lifestyle strategies’. This SI discusses examples of design and technology activism, housing and water commoning, and alternative transport initiatives, driven or catalysed by experts and professionals. De Castro Mazarro et al. (2023) empirically substantiate this with a survey of more than 400 designs in four international exhibitions on sustainable architecture and design, which identifies architectural practices that successfully reduce the embodied carbon of their interventions through simple technologies and design layouts that question growth-oriented construction regimes and urban development logics.

Step five: Greeting the elephant in the room: The North/South dialectics of institutional and activist degrowth practices

Cosmovisions in planning as response to resource use and resilience

I use cosmovisions in planning to refer to other-than-growth-values, questions of ecologically unequal exchange and solidarities in resource use. These are degrowth alternatives that can engage the resource use and resilience approaches at multiple scales. A starting point of such cosmovisions is to forge cultural imaginaries of living in a region built on degrowth. Here, Buen Vivir cosmovisions provide an apt cultural entry point for re-imagining alternatives to growth, emphasising quality of life, wellbeing and intrinsic nature embedded in community (Gudynas, 2011). Originating from transboundary Andean communities in Ecuador and Bolivia and subsequently incorporated into national constitutions, Buen Vivir cannot be equivocated to degrowth. However, both reject growth as means to development, providing syncretic advantages (Gudynas, 2011). The cultural contribution of a Buen-Vivir-inspired-degrowth is to enable institutions to pursue other values beyond economic growth (Gudynas, 2011). Here, multi-sectoral planning practices can integrate reciprocity, cooperation and redistribution, rather than merely competition, into regional planning policies. Agenda 2030’s goal of poverty reduction through effective resource mobilisation could benefit from such cosmovisions. Buen Vivir also suggests qualitatively different objectives which could be useful, for example, in NUA’s food security objectives as part of territorial planning. Buen Vivir can also provide an ethical scaffolding for non/more-than human rights in environmental planning practices (). This goes beyond the instrumental and relational references to nature – as merely heritage, resource and habitat – in Agenda 2030 and NUA (, ).

For instance, degrowthers are in a much stronger position to advocate for a universal basic income than mainstream green-growthers. A major axiom of degrowth is that our economy needs to descale in many if not most sectors. Since climate change is primarily driven by the “ of the Global North,” rich countries need to shrink our economies while  productivity in sectors that are sustainable and necessary. This most likely translates to : Professor Jared Fitzgerald at Boston College has found that each percent increase in working hours corresponds to a 0.65 percent increase in carbon emissions. Combined with redistributive policies, reducing the world’s working hours could thus be a necessary component to decarbonizing the global economy. While the final bill proposing a Green New Deal  to UBI due to backlash over the notion of supporting those “unwilling to work,” degrowthers can advocate for UBI precisely for its potential to  to reclaim their time and take up non-growth-based labor.

Degrowthers also invite us to  in a world that has eschewed growth for growth’s sake. Degrowthers blame the “capitalist economic model” for producing a society which prioritizes “corporate profits, over-production and excess consumption” over “social and ecological well-being;” degrowth’s “logical implication” is to  since, as political economist Güney Işıkara posits, “[o]nly under social ownership of the means of production can we extend democracy to the realm where resources are allocated and limits are defined.” In pursuit of this, ecosocialist scholars like  argue that “degrowth should aim for a truly democratic, workers’ controlled production system, where alienation is actively countered by a collective reappropriation of the products of labor and by a truly democratic decision-making process over the use of the surplus.” To this end, degrowthers could support a transition to “” by advocating policies that specifically encourage the growth of worker co-operatives, public banking, and the public provision of essential goods.

Degrowth depends on reducing energy and resource use to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a safe, just, and equitable way. It means reducing inequality, investing in universal public goods, and distributing income and opportunity more fairly. Because we already have enough. I think of the graph of life expectancy against GDP that shows that life expectancy in countries flattens at around 80 when the per capita GDP is around $12 000 and that countries like the US (per capita GDP $55 000) and the United Arab Emirates (per capita GDP $76 000) have life expectancies below 80.6 The American ecologist Herman Daly recognised that after a certain point growth begins to become “uneconomic,” creating more “illth” than wealth through polluted air, excessive consumption of unhealthy foods, using machines rather than our bodies, and overwork. Making degrowth happen will, Hickel writes, “require a movement, as with every struggle for social and ecological justice in history.” He has no ready made formula, but he identifies seven steps. End planned obsolescence. Smartphones are a good example: 13 billion were manufactured between 2010 and 2019 with 10 billion discarded. Cut advertising, most of which is persuading us to buy things we don’t need. Shift from ownership to usership; the future of cars is not everybody owning an electric car but people mostly using public transport and sharing cars when necessary. End food waste seems obvious, but GDP, the aim of growth and a flawed, inhuman measure, rises not only by producing more food, but also by companies disposing of the waste. Scale down ecologically destructive industries like fossil fuels, beef farming, flying, and mining. Work less in paid employment, which would mean better quality of life, lower unemployment, and less environmental destruction. Cancel debts, particularly those of low-income countries. This anti-capitalist measure has religious roots in the Hebrew Law of Jubilee, whereby debts were automatically cancelled every seventh year. The law is associated with the Hebrew concept of redemption.

Planning, economic regulation, limiting certain social practices, high levels of community cooperation and a slowing down of life (of course not for all, but for many), have all been responses to COVID-19. Similar measures have previously been labelled ‘politically impossible’ or ‘unrealistic’ in the context of ecological and other social crises, yet they have now become a reality across the world. COVID-19, like many other crises, highlights the potential for transformative action (and change) when societies decide that the crisis at hand warrants discarding the previous bounds of normalcy. For example, the Spanish government pledged to provide a regular payment to its poorest citizens in the wake of the corona crisis, and Scotland is seriously considering a comprehensive universal basic income (UBI) (Harris, 2020b). Rent strikes have been coordinated across the United States (Lowrey, 2020), sending a clear message that shelter is more important than absentee rents. People across the world are now planning domestic summer holidays based on the assumption that plane travel is unlikely, a restriction that would have been unthinkable pre-corona but is now being accepted as common-sense. The corona crisis has not only illustrated the possibilities of radical policy proposals (e.g. UBI and rent moratoriums), but it has also shown through lived experience that shopping, traveling and working less does not cause the sky to fall in, and maybe this has provoked us to reconsider what is most important in life. If anything, the corona crisis teaches us that our lived environments can change rapidly and drastically, but also that societal responses can be swift and prioritise the most vulnerable in society, if there is a desire. A degrowth society, generalising these principles of social justice and ecological sustainability, would reduce the probability that such crises occur in the first place, and be far more resilient to a world full of unpredictability. From analysis to action Given how much society has changed due to COVID-19, it is clear that the potential exists to actively reorganize society around degrowth principles, even though this would be a significantly greater task. Of course, we should be aware that there is a historical precedent for right-wing, populist, and neoliberal governments exploiting crises such as the current one to re-embed their agendas and consolidate their power. After the financial crisis of 2008-2009, these powers enacted austerity policies for the majority and bailed out the financial and insurance sector with public money (Mirowski, 2013). We can already see this scenario repeating itself, with bailouts of KLM-Air France (€10bn; Morgan, 2020a), Lufthansa (€10bn; Russell, 2020), and Renault (€5bn; Morgan, 2020b), among others. However, there is mounting resistance against a return to the status quo and business as usual. We have seen states planning, regulating and being challenged, communities creating mutual aid networks, and individuals radically adjusting their lifestyles. We have witnessed degrowth-aligned activism, organizing and policy-making across all scales of society. The global anti-aviation network, Stay Grounded, has denounced the bailouts of an unsustainable industry with public funds, demanding national governments to “save people not planes” (Stay Grounded, 2020). In the United States, flourishing networks of mutual aid, community support and local resilience are responses of necessity to a crisis which has disproportionately impacted people of colour. The demands of Black Lives Matter for rent cancellation and food sovereignty explicitly link the vulnerabilities revealed by COVID-19 and highlight alternative ways of meeting basic human needs (Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, 2020). In Hawai’i, the State Commission on the Status of Women (2020) has developed an explicit feminist economic recovery plan to deal with the negative effects of COVID-19. Its policy recommendations include drastic changes to the ways in which women’s work is valued and compensated, and calls for the strengthening of education, childcare and healthcare programs. The municipality of Amsterdam is employing Kate Raworth’s model of ‘doughnut economics’ to guide a post-COVID recovery which prioritizes social and ecological wellbeing rather than economic growth (Boffey, 2020b). Finally, millions of acts of cooperation, solidarity and kindness that do not make the news, but abound in our neighbourhoods and communities, testify every day that humans are not selfish, utility-maximizing individuals, but care deeply for each other and their environments. Moreover, from within the degrowth community a strong case has been made for a post-COVID economic system aligned with degrowth principles. This took the form of an open letter that was signed by more than 2,000 degrowth academics, activists and practitioners, and appeared in media outlets all over the world (Degrowth.info, 2020). This open letter, ‘New Roots for the economy: re-imagining the future after the corona crisis’, outlined five key principles to tackle the crisis induced by COVID-19 and build a just and more sustainable society. The principles are as follows: (1) put life at the centre of our economic systems; (2) radically re-evaluate how much and what work is necessary for a good life for all; (3) organize society around the provision of essential goods and services; (4) democratize society; and (5) base political and economic systems on the principle of solidarity (New Roots Collective, 2020). The letter highlights the vulnerability of growth-based economies to crises (including pandemics), calls for the decommodification of health services, and highlights the potential of this crisis for society to properly value care work as well as other basic health services). We believe that the degrowth movement has a lot to offer in this moment of crisis, on the one hand in drawing the links between our unsustainable economic system and COVID-19, and on the other hand by presenting degrowth as a radically fair and more sustainable alternative based on the principles outlined above. Yet, for the movement to have a meaningful impact, it must ally and work with other emancipatory projects and social movements, going beyond diagnostics and theories towards the important, though messy work of organizing collectively and building these desired futures.

For degrowth as a political project to come to shape transformations on the various planes, a comprehensive coalition of social forces would be needed to promote degrowth at the plane of [b] social interactions. This coalition could employ various methods such as organising bottom- up initiatives, networks and teamwork and manifest on different scales. The thousands of degrowth-compatible micro-level civil society and business initiatives that are mushrooming these years may, together with various social movements (Burkhart et al., 2020), come to provide the basis for a mobilisation of such a coalition. Such initiatives, e.g., eco- communities, may indeed facilitate the practice and culture of solidar- ity, care and respect for others (see ‘more’ in Table 1), as well as improve material transactions with nature. Yet at the same time it should be kept in mind that people are different, meaning that community living in for example an eco-community can be an unpleasant experience if it does not resonate with one's inner being (plane [d]). In this context it is worth keeping in mind that solitary living does not necessarily inflict more harm on nature than does communal living, as can for instance be seen with the tiny house movement and individuals practising voluntary simplicity. Moreover, some bottom-up initiatives can become isola- tionist and even exclude wider participation, thus not maximising their potential to make change on the plane of [c] social structure, or they can even alienate others from the cause. Again, this underscores the need to recognise that no mode of living or initiative is all good or all bad. As a political project, degrowth is different from traditional political projects in that it cuts across/transcends traditional classes. Inevitably, those advocating degrowth are rooted in classes (on plane [c]) – most of them probably in the middle classes – yet degrowth is not a project aspiring to promote the interests of this or other classes – or for that matter only the interests of human beings. In other words, those pro- moting degrowth do it not because they themselves stand to gain more from its realisation than would others, but because they believe that it is necessary if the needs of human and other beings are to be met now and in the future. The absence of support for degrowth from powerful social forces, for example, business associations, governments, labour unions or international organisations, has been identified as “the weakest spot in the degrowth project” (Barca et al., 2019: 6). In Barca's analysis, attracting support from “ecologically minded” members of the global middle class who are willing to consume and work less does not suffice if the degrowth project is to shape overall societal developments. In her words, the project will “remain politically weak unless it manages to enter into dialogue with a broadly defined global working class – including both wage labor and the myriad forms of work that support it – and its organizations” (Barca, 2019: 214). While this analysis is undoubtedly true, it is also necessary to tran- scend the class-based perspective of (historical materialist) critical po- litical economy if we are to imagine a coalition that could enabledegrowth as a political project to shape societal developments. And certainly, it is necessary to transcend such a perspective if degrowth is thought of not merely as a political project in the abovementioned sense but also more broadly as transformation processes unfolding on all four planes of being. No single type of actor, acting on the basis of one particular identity (such as class), is powerful enough to make it happen. In a different context, feminist diverse economies scholars Gibson-Gra- ham and Dombroski (2020) place hope in the movements and activism that young people, women and indigenous peoples engage in globally. They for instance note that “[b]ecause women are everywhere and therefore always somewhere, change can be enacted in all those many somewheres” (2020: 20). In a similar vein, degrowth transformations can only materialise through the combined actions of people (irre- spective of their gender and race) positioned everywhere, including on various scales (local, national, transnational) and in the sites of civil society, businesses and state apparatuses. Naturally, these sites should be seen as interrelated and there is no clear boundary between them. For instance, a member of the civil society can be a businessperson, whereas the state is a structure which imposes constraining (as well as empow- ering) structures onto both civil society and business. Moreover, participation in transformations on plane [b] may have implications for the inner being of the members of civil society. Indeed, as Archer (2010: 274) notes, “actors themselves change in the very process of actively pursuing changes in the social order”. In each of the sites (civil society, state, business), transformations would entail processes of reducing and if possible absenting the ‘less items’ and nurturing growth of the ‘more items’ (Table 1) on the four planes of social being. In terms of business, for instance, transformations mean improving material transactions with nature (plane [a]) via focusing on production for needs in a place-sensitive manner, enhancing social relations (plane [b]) via creating closer and more genuine ties with consumers, activists, (sustainability-minded) local governments and communities, participation in the transformation in the structures of production and establishing formal and informal networks with other businesses (plane [c]). Transformations on plane [d] necessitate nurturing by the businesspersons the attitude of gentleness and the practice of care towards humans, non-humans and nature. Business practices, as practices more generally, always unfold in particular con- texts (Ha ̈gerstrand, 2012). Degrowth practices would for example un- fold under the constellations of political, economic, cultural, educational, and other social structures existing in different places. This context would significantly impact transformation processes as a result of which they would differ from one place to the next. Practices would also unfold differently depending on the constellation of the natural structures with which human societies transact. By natural structures we mean topographies, climates, landscapes, ecosystems, bioregions, and their change. Moreover, the process of unfolding is emerging, non- linear, most likely characterised by setbacks. While actions by actors positioned everywhere (i.e., civil society, businesses and state apparatuses) are needed for degrowth trans- formations, such transformations are more likely to be initiated by some actors than others. Specifically, it is difficult to imagine governments coming out in support of degrowth and adopting eco-social policies in the current ideological climate. Alexander and Gleeson (2022) are cor- rect to note that doing so would be political suicide. For degrowth transformations to be initiated on planes [a], [b] and [c], then, a massive civil society mobilisation, combined with a surge in degrowth- compatible business (Nesterova, 2020, 2021), would be required. If such a mobilisation of growth-critical and socio-ecological social forces were to gain a decisive momentum it could make it attractive, or at least feasible, for political parties and states to pursue degrowth policies. The outcome could be “a combination of bottom-up mobilisations and action and top-down regulation, resulting in a new mix of property forms including communal, state, and individual property and a new division of labour between market, state, and ‘commons’” (Koch, 2020: 127). Indeed, given the depth of change that degrowth transformations entail, and the speed with which they would need to happen, it is just as improbable that they can materialise solely through bottom-up, grass- roots initiatives, as it is improbable that they can emerge solely via top- down policies. And just as degrowth cannot be realised without policies implemented by state apparatuses at the local, national and trans- national scales, so it cannot come about without the involvement of businesses and large groups of citizens.

With this contribution, which continues and deepens the dialogue between critical realism and degrowth that we initiated elsewhere (Buch-Hansen and Nesterova, 2021; Nesterova, 2021), we have sought to conceptualise degrowth in a comprehensive and non-reductionist manner. This conceptualisation entails that degrowth is understood to involve deep transformations on each of the four interrelated planes of social being identified by Bhaskar (1986, 1993): [a] material trans- actions with nature, [b] social interactions between persons, [c] social structure, and [d] peoples' inner being. On each plane, these trans- formations consist in reducing, and ultimately absenting, some currently existing items while expanding others. On plane [a], degrowth involves less matter and energy throughput and more clean energy forms and behaviour premised on regard for planetary boundaries, biodiversity and non-human beings. On plane [b], degrowth entails social in- teractions based less on, for example, individualism, intolerance, and myths and more on empathy, tolerance of diversity and concern for others. On plane [c], degrowth implies transforming social structures so that economies and societies come to have less competition and in- equalities, fewer hierarchies, and a decreasingly prominent growth imperative; and more collaborative relations and flat hierarchies com- bined with a more equal distribution of resources. Finally, on plane [d], degrowth would require most people to self-transform, becoming less egoistic, possessive, and materialistic and more reflexive, gentle, mindful and capable of seeing themselves as part of the broader existence. Three aspects of the conceptualisation we have developed in this paper are worth highlighting. Firstly, in thinking about the planes, it is important to recognise diversity on each of them. One aspect of this is that degrowth living can assume many forms. For example, they can range from living in convivial communities to pursuing a solitary mode of being. Another aspect is that degrowth transformations can only materialise through the combined actions of people positioned in different sites (civil society, businesses and state apparatuses) and on various scales (local, national, transnational). Secondly, the interrelat- edness of the planes is crucial to take into consideration when theorising and practising degrowth. For example, when designing (mixes of) specific eco-social policies, it is vital to keep in mind that they will have effects on all four planes, and that positive effects on one plane do not necessarily translate into positive effects on all. Thirdly, we propose gentleness and care as the underlying principles that can guide trans- formations across the various planes. Further to this, we conceptualise degrowth as deep transformations occurring on all four interrelated planes of social being, on different scales and in all sites, guided by gentleness and care, towards a society co-existing harmoniously within itself and with nature. Understood in these terms, far from being an outcome that can be caused by a singular mechanism, degrowth can only be caused by a variety of mechanisms working in concert. Such mechanisms range from democratically adopted top-down eco-social policies to bottom-up civil society and business initiatives. For such mechanisms to be activated on a sufficient scale, deep change at the level of the individual is necessary. That is, both a sustained practice of degrowth and consent to top-down policies require people in large numbers to come to think that degrowth is desirable.

To begin with, degrowth is not the same as negative GDP growth. Instead, degrowth envisions a society in which wellbeing does not depend on economic growth and the  and  consequences of its pursuit. Degrowth proposes an equitable, voluntary reduction of overconsumption in affluent economies.

Equally important is to shift the economy away from the ecologically and socially harmful idea that producing more stuff is always good. Instead, economic activity could focus on promoting care, cooperation and autonomy, which would also increase wellbeing and give people a bigger say in how their lives are run.

Just because COVID-19, like an economically triggered recession, has resulted in a downscaling of production, transport, and emissions amongst other things, this does not mean it represents degrowth. Firstly, a degrowth transformation must be planned and democratic. In contrast, the COVID-19 crisis and its responses have been mostly reactive – meaningful measures were implemented only once people started dying – and highly undemocratic, characterised by top-down policies, the enactment of emergency powers, and a murky process of bail-out decisions. Secondly, degrowth requires a long-term commitment to the downscaling of production and consumption as well as the reorganisation of society in a sustainable and just way. What the COVID-19 crisis has thus far shown is governments’ willingness to slow down the economy in the short run, but without any intention of maintaining these reduced levels of economic activity. Rather, the shutdown of most economies was delayed as long as possible to maintain growth, and it has been conducted with the explicit motivation of rebooting economic growth as soon as possible. Thirdly, COVID-19 has so far disproportionately affected the most vulnerable in society, and not only the very old and young, as is usually assumed. Many workers who don’t have the option of paid remote work must face the trade-off between risky infection at work or staying at home awaiting unpayable bills (Jones, 2020). Diabetics, many of whom also have a lower income, are at a higher risk of infection from the virus (Fisher and Bubola, 2020). Homeless people are being particularly affected by the corona crisis, as services such as food banks, soup kitchens, crisis centres and overnight shelters have been forced to close due to insufficient access to protective equipment which would allow their safe operation. Making matters worse, in some places the police have issued fines to the homeless for not maintaining social distancing (Boffey, 2020a). Even the most basic sanitation measures, such as washing one’s hands regularly, becomes an impossible task for communities without access to running water, as is the case for example in central Chile (McGowan, 2020). In contrast, the rich have not struggled to access basic needs or services in the same way that the poor and marginalized have. As an example, in March, the complete Utah Jazz professional basketball team was tested immediately following a game, accounting for 20 percent of the state’s total conducted tests up to that point (Harris, 2020a). The corona crisis reveals the deep socio-economic inequalities in society, the unequal access to and distribution of basic goods and services, the uneven impact of crises and the many vulnerabilities faced by large sections of the population. In life under neoliberal capitalism, money saves lives and a lack of it can kill you. In summary, a degrowth transformation would be planned and proactively pursued, and have justice and equality at its core. As these examples - among a myriad of others - show, none of this is the case in the current situation.

To begin with, degrowth is not the same as negative GDP growth. Instead, degrowth envisions a society in which wellbeing does not depend on economic growth and the environmental and social consequences of its pursuit. Degrowth proposes an equitable, voluntary reduction of overconsumption in affluent economies. Equally important is to shift the economy away from the ecologically and socially harmful idea that producing more stuff is always good. Instead, economic activity could focus on promoting care, cooperation and autonomy, which would also increase wellbeing and give people a bigger say in how their lives are run. Yet, for many people the word smacks of misery and the type of frugality they are trying to escape from during the cost of living crisis. But degrowth, if successfully achieved, would arguably feel better than a recession or a cost-of-living crisis. Here are three reasons why: 1. Degrowth is democratic The first is the undemocratic and unplanned nature of a recession or cost-of-living crisis. Most citizens would agree, for example, that they had little to no control over the deregulation of the finance industry, and subsequent boom in sub-prime mortgage lending and derivatives trading that caused the 2008/09 financial crash. Degrowth, on the other hand, is a profoundly democratic project. It emphasises direct democracy and deliberation, which means citizens can shape which economic sectors are decreased and by how much, and which ones will grow and by how much. One example of such a democratic endeavour is the Climate Assembly UK, whose 108 members were selected through a civic lottery process and were broadly representative of the population. After listening to expert testimony, the assembly issued a number of recommendations to support the UK’s net zero climate target. Over a third of all members prioritised support for sustainable growth. Economic growth itself was not among the top 25 priorities. 2. Degrowth would be egalitarian Recessions, especially when coupled with fiscal austerity, tend to amplify existing inequalities by hitting the poorest members of society first, including women, working-class communities and ethnic minorities. Degrowth drastically differs from a recession because it is a redistributive project. For instance, a universal basic income), an unconditional monthly state payment to all citizens, is a popular policy with degrowthers. The degrowth vision is that basic income should guarantee a dignified living standard, remunerate unpaid care, and provide access to healthcare, food and accommodation for those in need. It could be financed by “climate income” schemes that tax carbon and return revenues to the public. 3. Degrowth wouldn’t hinder climate action In an economy reliant on growth, a recession is generally bad news for the environment. For instance, for the UK to hit its net zero targets, it must make annual public investments of between £4 billion and £6 billion by 2030. A recession would threaten public spending as well as the confidence investors have in low carbon developments in transport, housing or energy. But such investments do not have to depend on growth but could instead be made through collective and democratic decisions to make climate action a priority. Carbon taxes will play a large part in this, as will stopping fossil fuel subsidies like the £3.75 billion tax break granted to develop the Rosebank oil and gas field in the sea north of Scotland. To make sure we stay within the environmental limits within which we can safely operate, sometimes known as our planetary boundaries, degrowth suggests democratically establishing limits on resource use. For example, global greenhouse gas emissions or non-renewable energy use could be capped at a given level, and decline annually. Sharing these resource “caps” among the population would ensure that while we stay within these safe environmental spaces, everyone has equitable access to the resources required to lead a fulfilling life. In contrast to the pursuit of endless growth, degrowth puts both climate action and human wellbeing at its heart.