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Articles
Doughnut Economics
David Howard on restoring balance to an unstable world.
Is it still possible for us to live a good life while avoiding climate catastrophe? How could society be organised to create the conditions for that, and so they are inherited by succeeding generations? If existing social and economic structures have led us to this looming crisis, what will be demanded of our successors, and what reasons for hope can we give?
Warnings that the world’s economic trajectory is unsustainable are not new. Fifty years ago, Donella Meadows and her co-authors pointed out in detail in The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (1972) that there were ‘limits to growth’. The steady accumulation of data since then has not changed that message, but only given it added urgency. The concept of economic limits has also been reinforced by the idea of ‘planetary boundaries’, first proposed in 2009 by Johan Rockström (then Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre) alongside a group of twenty-eight internationally-renowned scientists. Their pie chart showing nine global boundaries, including climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, provided a clear scientifically-determined picture of the dangers threatening ‘a safe operating space for humanity’.
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