As the climate crisis deepens, can traditional economic growth still deliver social progress? In this blog, Myfi Fenwick explores this and the contribution CAT graduate Gemma Young made towards the UN’s Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth which is aimed at helping shape practical solutions for a fairer, more regenerative future.

In July 2024, the former Un Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Olivier De Schutter published an initial report detailing the need for a post-growth approach to the eradication of poverty. The landing image for the report is striking – although notably AI generated. It depicts a young boy against a gold-orange horizon sitting on the summit of a landfill heap, ahead of him a wasteland stretches so vast it meets the sky. A visual reminder that we are exceeding our planetary boundaries.

Over the course of the next two years, De Schutter set out to produce The Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth, a policy toolkit created with global contributions from trade unions, movements, UN agencies, academics, policymakers. The result? Tangible and actionable policy options for multilateral decision makers, all of which move away from the continuous growth model, towards anti-poverty strategies that sit within planetary boundaries.

Why within Boundaries?

As Will Steffen et al. detailed in their seminal research, the 11,700-year-long Holocene epoch in which we exist has allowed us the stability to pursue growth; that same growth is now destabilising the conditions that allowed for it, and indeed, in which we can survive. And with this instability comes further deprivation.

As the Roadmap details, ‘of the 1.1 billion people living in acute poverty, 887 million are exposed to at least one major climate hazard, including droughts, floods, extreme heat or air pollution.’ The message is clear; we cannot set out to eradicate poverty without addressing the climate emergency – change must take place within planetary boundaries.

CAT Graduate Contribution

One of the contributors to the roadmap was CAT Graduate Gemma Young, who studied on our MSc in Sustainability and Behaviour Change. Inspired by her dissertation, Gemma’s proposal explores how financial markets might be redesigned to make investors more accountable for the socio-ecological consequences of the activities they finance.

Her proposed Scaled Investment Levy (SIL) is a systemic intervention that links investment returns to the social and environmental impacts generated by business activity. Economist Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics model provides an aspirational goal and a potential framework for establishing socio-ecological thresholds, against which business activity could be assessed. (See Figure 1).

Where those thresholds are breached, a levy would be applied to investors’ financial returns, scaled according to the severity of the socio-ecological impact. Rather than prescribing a particular levy rate, the proposal explores how progressively stronger financial consequences could make harmful activities less attractive to investors while favouring more regenerative alternatives.

The intervention is intended to influence behaviour as well as redistribute capital. By bringing the socio-ecological consequences of business activity directly into investment outcomes, the SIL seeks to encourage investors to consider those impacts when allocating capital. Revenue generated by the levy could then be directed towards repairing social and environmental harm. Together, these mechanisms aim to redirect investment away from activities that breach socio-ecological boundaries and towards those that contribute to a more equitable and regenerative economy.

A toolkit that must be used

Gemma’s proposal sits alongside contributions from 400 others who also offer anti-poverty strategies that do not rely on unlimited growth, one of whom is economist Kate Raworth, the creator of Doughnut Economics. Here at CAT, we have been fortunate to welcome Dr Raworth as a frequent guest lecturer on postgraduate modules such as The Introduction to Politics and Economics of the Environment, which introduces students to the roles that power, policy, agency and economic structures play in producing the environmental crisis. As such this a fitting full circle moment, given that Raworth’s regenerative economy within planetary boundaries framework was deployed by Gemma in her own proposal. It is also a moment that reminds us at CAT that this is why the Graduate School exists, to support people like Gemma to develop the skills and knowledge to make a real and tangible contribution to the protection of our planet.

In June this year the roadmap was formally presented to the Human Rights Council in Geneva by the current Un Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Elena Díaz Galán. That same month Switzerland’s national weather agency reported that temperatures had exceeded 37C for the first time in June, breaking a record set in 1947. A stark reminder that as a document, The Roadmap is a significant achievement, but as the climate crisis prevails and poverty deepens, it simply cannot remain as just a document – these strategies must become actions.

The Ongoing Reality of the Climate Crisis

This summer in particular, the indicators that we are driving the destabilisation of earth’s systems have been constant, signifying that we are no longer in what Will Steffen et al define as a ‘safe operating space for humanity.’ The impact of climate change is being felt globally at all levels and for those living in poverty, the effects are acute.

Extreme Heat, Wildfires and Food and Energy Insecurity

• For countries already facing additional pressures these effects are catastrophic. In Somalia, extreme drought conditions, conflict and displacement has left the country at risk of famine, with the World Food Programme reporting that a total of ‘6.5 million people are projected to face crisis levels of hunger or worse, including 2 million facing emergency levels.’
• This year in Spain, at the time of writing, a lack of rainfall and heatwaves have left 256,937 hectares burnt by wildfires – an area almost equivocal in size to Dorset.
• In Central and Southeastern Europe, the Danube River is running critically low. The ongoing drought has forced the closure of nuclear reactors that are unsafe to operate without the river as a coolant, as well as hydroelectric power plant turbines causing mass energy insecurity.
• Further downstream in Ryahovo, Bulgaria, they recently uncovered the bones of a mammoth belonging to the Pleistocene epoch, a visual reminder of a time when earth’s climate was not stable, and an earie reminder that we are destabilising it once more.

The Roadmap as an offer of practical hope

The examples above are an incredibly small insight into the devasting global effects of the climate crisis – if we look further, additional examples are innumerable. What this illuminates is how important it is that all 80 of the Roadmap’s Policy Recommendations sit within Planetary Boundaries. Given the current situation, it is a source of hope – from policy recommendations that recognise the effects of colonial extraction, to measures designed to alleviate fiscal pressures from climate-related shocks, policies that address access to clean energy, water and healthcare to decentralised energy systems and beyond. Indeed, whether the policies address the climate crisis directly or do so indirectly through the planetary boundary framework, what they all offer is hope that transformational change can take place without equating progress to limitless capital growth.

Evading the Pursuit of a Wasteland

In the image prefacing Olivier De Schutter’s initial report the young boy perches on the summit of a landfill heap, we cannot see the ground, we see no trees, the only indication of any other human activity is in the landfill wasteland stretched before him. It is a photograph that brings to mind the imagery in T.S Elliot’s Wasteland.

‘What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water.’

We cannot extract from the dry stone; roots cannot grow from a planet stripped of its resources…the pursuit of limitless growth through extractive and exploitative practices cannot sustain humanity.

Strategies such as those detailed in the Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth can only fulfill the promise of hope if they become actions.