Negative Effects Of Economic Growth On The Environment – Do something for our planet, print this page only if necessary. Even a small action can make a huge difference when millions of people do it!

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Negative Effects Of Economic Growth On The Environment

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Economic growth is closely linked to an increase in production, consumption and resource use and has harmful effects on the natural environment and human health. It is unlikely that a long-term, absolute decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures and impacts can be achieved on a global scale; therefore, societies must rethink what growth and progress mean and their significance for global sustainability.

The world is undergoing rapid change. Many drivers of change interact in a very complex interaction of human needs, desires, activities and technologies (, 2020) and contribute to the Great Acceleration in human consumption and environmental degradation. Human civilization is currently profoundly unsustainable.

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These dynamics must change. Governments, scientists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worldwide are coming together to try to come up with new ideas, policies, blueprints and stories. This story is part of a series called ‘Stories for change’ published by the . It presents alternative perspectives on economic growth and human progress and explores the diversity of ideas needed to transform our society towards sustainable goals and meet the ambitions of the European Green Deal.

Building on the insights from reports on drivers of change and sustainability transitions (, 2017, 2019a, 2019b, 2020), this briefing explores alternative ideas about growth and progress with the aim of broadening the sustainability debate. This comes at a crucial time for the EU, which is facing urgent challenges and opportunities associated with fundamental change. The EU has achieved unprecedented levels of prosperity and well-being in recent decades, and its social, health and environmental standards are among the highest in the world (, 2019c).

Maintaining this position does not have to depend on economic growth. Could the European Green Deal, for example, become a catalyst for EU citizens to create a society that consumes less and grows in other than material dimensions?

Since global decoupling of economic growth and consumption of resources does not occur, true creativity is required: how can society develop and grow in quality (e.g. purpose, solidarity, empathy), rather than in quantity (e.g. material living standards), in more fair way? What are we willing to give up to meet our sustainability ambitions?

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Globally, growth has not been decoupled from resource consumption and environmental pressures and is unlikely to become so (Parrique et al., 2019; Hickel and Kallis, 2020; Wiedmann et al., 2020). The global material footprint, gross domestic product (GDP) and greenhouse gas emissions have increased rapidly over time, and are strongly correlated (Figure 1). While population growth was the main cause of increasing consumption from 1970 to 2000, the emergence of a global wealthy middle class has been the stronger driver since the turn of the century (Panel, 2019; Wiedmann et al., 2020). Furthermore, technological development has so far been associated with increased consumption rather than the reverse.

Europe consumes more and contributes more to environmental degradation than other regions, and Europe’s prospects for achieving its environmental policy goals for 2020, 2030 and 2050 are poor (, 2019c). Several of Europe’s environmental footprints exceed planetary boundaries (Sala et al., 2020; /FOEN, 2020).

Sources: Modified from Wiedmann et al. (2020). Reproduced under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Data from Olivier and Peters (2020) on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; UNEP and IRP (2018) for material tracking; and World Bank (2020a) for GDP. More information

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Advanced policies (e.g. the European Green Deal and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs) propose decoupling economic growth and resource use as a solution. However, scientific debates about the possibility of separation date back to the 19th century and there is still no consensus. Recent studies, such as Hickel and Kallis (2020) and Parrique et al. (2019), find no evidence of an absolute decoupling between growth and environmental degradation occurring on a global scale.

While some EU countries achieved a reduction in some forms of pollution between 1995 and the mid-2010s (e.g. acidification, eutrophication, greenhouse gases), the decoupling between growth and environmental footprints (e.g. water, materials, energy and greenhouse gases) associated with EU consumption patterns are often relative and vary between countries (Sanyé-Mengual et al., 2019; NTNU, 2020).

Such changes are associated with a combination of factors (see, 2020). These include structural economic change that has led to the outsourcing of significant parts of energy-intensive activities to non-EU countries and the financing of EU economies (Kovacic et al., 2018). Absolute reduction of environmental pressures and impacts would require fundamental transformations to a different type of economy and society – instead of incremental efficiency gains within established production and consumption systems.

If economic growth cannot be decoupled from resource use, can the use of existing resources be extended within the economy? Circular economy policies aim to improve waste management and stimulate responsible production and consumption cultures. The circular economy, however, may not deliver the transformation to sustainability if circular measures feed a growth strategy that leads to increased material consumption. An economy downsized to match the material input it can recycle would be a very slow economy (Kovacic et al., 2019a).

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The concept of “circular economy” indicates that material resources could be increasingly sourced from within the economy, reducing environmental impact by increasing the reuse and recycling of materials. However, this socio-technical “imagination” has limited potential for sustainability, as revealed by biophysical analysis (Kovacic et al., 2019a). In fact, at the scale of the entire economy, only around 12% of the material input was recycled in the EU-27 in 2019 (Eurostat, 2020). Given current product designs and management technologies, recycling rates of materials such as plastics, paper, glass and metals can — and should — be greatly increased in line with EU policy ambitions. However, overall, recyclable material remains a meager share of material throughput.

The low potential for circularity is because a very large part of primary material throughput is composed of (1) energy carriers that are degraded by use as explained by the laws of thermodynamics and cannot be recycled, and (2) building materials that are added to the building stock, which is recycled over much longer periods (Figure 2). This can be interpreted in the light of Tainter’s (1988) study of the collapse of complex societies: as complexity increases, there are diminishing marginal returns on improvements in problem-solving; therefore, improvements at the local scale have very little effect on the overall system.

In addition, high throughput and low rates of recycling seem to be conditions for high productivity (Hall and Klitgaard, 2012). Advanced societies require high throughputs of energy and materials to maintain their organizational complexity (Tainter and Patzek, 2012). What these insights point to is the need to rethink and reframe social notions of progress in broader terms than consumption.

Note: The figures in brackets (above) indicate the share of a given category of material from the total processed material and refer to the year 2014. The figures for recycling (below) indicate the share of recycling in each category and refer to the year 2019. category ‘ Metals’ also includes associated extractive wastes.

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Historically, modern states embraced economic thought that focused on economic growth and conceptualized social and environmental problems as externalities. As a result, growth is culturally, politically and institutionally entrenched. Globally, the legitimacy of governments cannot be separated from their ability to deliver economic growth and provide employment.

However, recent decades have seen various initiatives to “rethink economics” (including the movement with that name, Rethinking Economics, 2020) and develop theoretical perspectives that combine attention to the legitimate needs of the current human population with the need for transformation. to a sustainable future. Ecomodernist thought

Other scientific fields and social movements have gone beyond the idea of ​​green growth (Wiedmann et al., 2020) and proposed concepts such as “circular economy” (Raworth, 2017) and “decline” (Demaria et al., 2013), which are outlined. in Table 1.

An umbrella term for more radical academic, political and social movements that emphasize the need to reduce production and consumption and define goals other than economic growth  (Demaria et al., 2013).

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Growth agnostic, this school of thought focuses on the need to decouple welfare from economic growth (Wiedmann et al., 2020).

Based on an eco-modernist thought that invests its hopes in scientific and technological progress (eg eco-design, green innovation) directed towards sustainability. In other words, ‘green growth’ means fostering economic growth and development while ensuring that

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