Report Calls for New Measures of National Development, Beyond GDP

Climate change cannot be addressed in a vacuum; it is only the most prominent consequence of an obsession with economic growth as the only path to development, a coalition of environmental of social justice groups argues in a report released Monday.

The public debate on climate change so far has focused heavily on such issues as emissions targets, costs to industry and the safe upper limits global temperatures, but these only graze the surface of some of the underlying causes, the authors write.

The goal of their report, "Other Worlds are Possible–Human Progress in an Age of Climate Change", published by the International Institute for Environment and Development and the New Economics Foundation on behalf of the Working Group on Climate Change and Development, is to raise awareness of the damage stemming from what Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Chairman Rajendra Pachauri calls “our current development paradigm.”

“It is clear that current mitigation and adaptation responses are inadequate and that the model of development currently being pursued globally will only exacerbate the worsening impacts of climate change,” Pachauri writes in a foreword to the report.

He hopes the report will be “a call-to-action for the creation of a more responsible and sustainable development paradigm.”

The fact that the world's climates have been changing is only one — though a major — outcome of the current paradigm.

“Climate change, important as it is, is nevertheless a symptom of a deeper malady, namely our fixation on unlimited growth of the economy as the solution to nearly all problems,” writes Herman E. Daly, a professor at the University of Maryland and prominent ecological economist.

“Apply an anodyne to climate and, if growth continues, something else will soon burst through limits of past adaptation and finitude, thereby becoming the new crisis on which to focus our worries.”

The “problems” to which Daly is referring are familiar ones — lack of access to health care, inadequate education, poverty, a widening gap between the rich countries and the poor — but, according to the report, the approach that has been taken to mitigate them in the past has done little to help and has often exacerbated the problems.

This occurs as industrialized governments put forward global economic growth as a cure for all the world’s problems. The benefits of such growth accrue to the industrialized countries, while the costs fall disproportionately to developing countries, the authors write.

“Poorer countries are being set up to fail,” the report concludes.

“In the old convictions about global growth as a panacea, it is as if we hope that by turning natural capital into financial capital we can somehow disengage ourselves from our dependence on the natural environment. In climate change, we find evidence that this approach is misguided, myopic and unsustainable.”

The report bounces between climate change, development issues and a critique of the global economic system, but this is part of the point the authors are trying to make — that all these issues are indelibly linked and can be traced back to unsustainable economic models and the consensus decision to stick to these models even when faced with their failures and negative effects.

While climate change is just one of many effects, it is also the one that brings a very real threat to the developing world. In recapping recent research on climate change, the authors paint a picture of inadequate action and overly optimistic targets. The 2 degrees Celsius rise in global surface temperature that policymakers and scientists have agreed the planet should not be allowed to pass, for instance, would still inundate small island states. “1.5C is a better target as many of them will disappear with warming beyond this point,” it says, citing a June study in the journal Nature.

What is ultimately needed, the report says, is a shift in economic models.