During Cop30 negotiations in Brazil last year, delegates heard a familiar argument: rising emissions are unavoidable for countries pursuing growth.
Since the first Cop in the 1990s, developing nations have had looser reduction targets to reflect the economic gap between them and richer countries, which emitted millions of tonnes of CO2 as they pulled ahead. The concession comes from the idea that an inevitable cost of prosperity is environmental harm.
That pattern seems to be holding. In 2024, global GDP per capita reached a new high as did annual carbon emissions. But as climate targets slip and warnings mount that tipping points may already have been crossed, faith in growth for growth’s sake is starting to fracture.
This week, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, called for economies to “move beyond GDP” as a measure of progress, warning that the world’s “existing accounting systems” were driving the planet towards disaster.
His remarks echo an increasingly influential school of economics, known broadly as “post-growth”, that asks what was once unthinkable: will solving the climate crisis mean learning to live without constant expansion?
Post-growth economists often reject GDP in favour of new frameworks that account for environmental damage – such as the “doughnut economics” adopted recently by Amsterdam, or New Zealand’s attempt at a “wellbeing budget”.
The field has its disagreements, particularly over the extent to which countries should actively pursue de-growth measures to scale down their economies. But proponents agree that with the planet pushed to the limit, a radical rethink is needed.
“Economic growth has a near mythical status in the affections of economists and politicians. But wishful thinking won’t solve the climate crisis,” said Tim Jackson, professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey and a leading post-growth economist. “Post-growth economics offers us more choice, more realism and more insight into the possibilities for human prosperity. It’s not about returning to the cave but about breaking free from our intellectual prisons.”
The roots of post-growth can be traced back to one book, which caused a storm upon its publication in the 1970s.
Some argue that Limits to Growth underestimated humanity’s ability to adapt in the face of environmental breakdown.
This technological optimism underpins the idea of “green growth” – that the world economy can keep expanding while avoiding catastrophe. Advocates point to the uptake of renewables, which has taken place to such an extent in some nations that growth has seemingly been decoupled from emissions.
Countries such as the UK, France, Germany and the US have all increased GDP per capita since the 2000s while cutting carbon emissions.
But experts heavily contest the evidence of decoupling. “It’s inconclusive because it focuses on the wrong thing: annual flows of emissions rather than their accumulation,” said Peter Victor, an emeritus professor at the University of York.
“It is the accumulated stock of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that causes climate change, not the annual flows. We are very far from decoupling the stock of atmospheric carbon dioxide from economic growth.”
Others point out that while some countries may have decoupled their growth from domestic emissions, the picture is more mixed when accounting for imported goods. Meanwhile, many countries – notably India and China – have yet to significantly decouple annual emissions from growth.
More broadly, since Limits to Growth was published, our understanding of how economic activity is damaging the planet has widened beyond just carbon emissions. Post-growth economics has emerged alongside the study of so-called “planetary boundaries” – hard environmental limits that, once crossed, could have disastrous consequences.
The research focuses on nine ecological processes, from climate change to ocean acidification and ozone depletion, and for each identifies the safe zone in which we should operate.
The most recent planetary health check, published in September, found seven of these nine boundaries were being breached to a dangerous degree.
When put against living standards, the study of planetary boundaries reveals a trade-off.
In 2018, researchers at the University of Leeds applied these boundaries to more than 150 countries, looking at metrics such as CO2 emissions, ecological footprints and land use. They examined how many of these boundaries a country had breached and compared this with progress on a variety of social indicators such as income, nutrition and life satisfaction.
Their key finding: no nation had met the basic needs of its residents while also staying within its biophysical limits.
The better off a country’s residents were, the more environmental ceilings were broken – the very opposite of where they should be if they were growing sustainably.
How this relationship can be broken, if at all, is where the efforts of ecological economists are now focused.
The Guardian spoke with a range of academics working in the field and, broadly speaking, they identified three contemporary positions.
One group are the green Keynesians, who believe green growth is possible through state-led transition. A signature policy idea from this family has been the green new deal and the need for public policy that delivers green investment, infrastructure and jobs.
On the flip side are the green capitalists, who again hope for growth but believe market reforms and technology will deliver it sustainably. Aside from optimism that innovation offers a way out, this group has also pushed ideas such as carbon pricing and deregulation of green industries. Both sides have shared ground, such as support for renewables or the need for public-private partnerships.
By contrast, those in the post-growth camp disagree on a more fundamental level: they say continued growth is not possible while keeping within the planet’s boundaries.
Victor said: “Post-growth encompasses many approaches, which differ in their scope and emphasis. However, they share a common understanding that the physical scale of the economy must be reduced to avoid further degradation of life-supporting planetary systems.”
The de-growth movement has been one of the most high-profile incarnations of this view, with its calls for the radical scaling down of production and consumption. Many in this family believe the scenario in Limits to Growth is already playing out, or will do shortly, pointing to long-term productivity slowdowns and low growth in many western economies.
De-growth proposals have included working time reductions, such as a four-day week, and maximum income caps, particularly to reduce the purchasing power of the rich. But there are others working within post-growth economics who take a more agnostic view. To them, whether green growth is possible is beside the point – instead policymakers need to shift priorities away from growth altogether to other measures of prosperity that can still improve wellbeing.
In any case, as of the most recent Cop negotiations our global destination has been agreed. Under the Paris agreement, global carbon emissions need to fall 45% by 2030, with net zero achieved by 2050, to stick to the target of 1.5C.
What remains uncertain is the path there and how, and whether, we can grow at the same time. It is, to take current global GDP, the $111.1tn question.
Data sources
In the introductory chart, data for CO2 emissions is sourced from the Global Carbon Budget project, while data on GDP per capita is sourced from the World Bank.
The Limits to Growth chart was generated using PyWorld3, a Python implementation of the World3 model used in Dynamics of Growth in a Finite World (1974).
This model differs slightly from the original Limits to Growth model (1972) because of different numerical parameters and a slightly different model structure.
