The Challenge Is to Create a Post-Growth World

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Post-growth is a systematic revision of our economic principles. It focuses on relationship and what the relationship needs, rather than products as substitute for psychological needs. We work less because we're not continually priming a growth-based system - so our lives have more leisure in them. But this path to degrowth makes more sense for us in the global north, because we're already rich. And that development model has created historical inequity,. it's that development model that's created the bulk of the impact on climate and biodiversity.

A key goal of governments around the world is economic growth – continually increasing production and consumption to keep GDP rising. But can our economies grow on a rapidly warming planet with finite resources? According to a recent UN report, the only way left to limit the worst impacts of the climate crisis is a “rapid transformation of societies”. In our third Cop27 special, Ian Sample speaks to ecological economist Tim Jackson about the myth of eternal growth, other ways to think about progress and prosperity, and what an economic system in balance with our planetary system might look like. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod