![]() ![]() ![]() This finding is worse than those of the two previous studies because the researchers accounted for the “rebound effect,” whereby improvements in resource efficiency drive down prices and cause demand to rise-thus canceling out some of the gains. The result? We hit 132 billion metric tons by 2050. It tested a scenario with carbon priced at a whopping $573 per metric ton, slapped on a resource extraction tax, and assumed rapid technological innovation spurred by strong government support. Environment Program-once one of the main cheerleaders of green growth theory-weighed in on the debate. Bottom line: no absolute decoupling.įinally, last year the U.N. Under these conditions, if the global economy kept growing by 3 percent each year, we’d still hit about 95 billion metric tons of resource use by 2050. The results were almost exactly the same as in Dittrich’s study. In their best-case scenario, the researchers assumed a tax that would raise the global price of carbon from $50 to $236 per metric ton and imagined technological innovations that would double the efficiency with which we use resources. In 2016, a second team of scientists tested a different premise: one in which the world’s nations all agreed to go above and beyond existing best practice. Burning through all those resources could hardly be described as absolute decoupling or green growth. But that is still a lot more than we’re consuming today. The results improved resource consumption would hit only 93 billion metric tons by 2050. The team then reran the model to see what would happen if every nation on Earth immediately adopted best practice in efficient resource use (an extremely optimistic assumption). For reference, a sustainable level of resource use is about 50 billion metric tons per year-a boundary we breached back in 2000. It found that human consumption of natural resources (including fish, livestock, forests, metals, minerals, and fossil fuels) would rise from 70 billion metric tons per year in 2012 to 180 billion metric tons per year by 2050. ![]() The group ran a sophisticated computer model that predicted what would happen to global resource use if economic growth continued on its current trajectory, increasing at about 2 to 3 percent per year. ![]() In the years since the Rio conference, three major empirical studies have arrived at the same rather troubling conclusion: Even under the best conditions, absolute decoupling of GDP from resource use is not possible on a global scale.Ī team of scientists led by the German researcher Monika Dittrich first raised doubts in 2012. Sustainable Development Goals.īut the promise of green growth turns out to have been based more on wishful thinking than on evidence. Environment Program all produced reports promoting green growth. In the run-up to the conference, the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the U.N. Green growth first became a buzz phrase in 2012 at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro. There’s just one hitch: New evidence suggests that green growth isn’t the panacea everyone has been hoping for. It sounds like an elegant solution to an otherwise catastrophic problem. In technical terms, the goal is to achieve “absolute decoupling” of GDP from the total use of natural resources, according to the U.N. Many policymakers have responded by pushing for what has come to be called “green growth.” All we need to do, they argue, is invest in more efficient technology and introduce the right incentives, and we’ll be able to keep growing while simultaneously reducing our impact on the natural world, which is already at an unsustainable level. These crises are being driven by global economic growth, and its accompanying consumption, which is destroying the Earth’s biosphere and blowing past key planetary boundaries that scientists say must be respected to avoid triggering collapse. Over the past few years, major newspapers, including the Guardian and the New York Times, have carried alarming stories on soil depletion, deforestation, and the collapse of fish stocks and insect populations. Warnings about ecological breakdown have become ubiquitous. ![]()
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