It will be Green Growth or No Growth at all, in the not too distant future. Which one is up to us? A bold statement? Not at all. Please follow me to see what the Sustainable Society Index (SSI) can tell us in this respect. Every two years since 2006 the SSI shows at a glance the level of sustainability of 151 countries, comprising 99% of the world population. The SSI consists of 21 indicators, covering the three wellbeing dimensions Human (HW), Environmental (EW) and Economic Wellbeing (EcW).
All data are retrieved from public sources: FAO, Aquastat, Unesco, World Bank, IEA, ILO, IMF, World Economic Forum, UNEP-WCMC, Global Footprint Network, FiBL.
In 2012 the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission has audited the SSI. JRC concluded that "the SSI framework is conceptually coherent, meets the statistical requirements set by JRC and that the SSI is well suited to assess nations" development towards sustainability in its broad sense: Human, Environmental and Economic Wellbeing.
2014 – worldwide
This is how the world looked in 2014:
The spider web shows the scores for each of the 21 indicators on a scale of 1 to 10. The centre of the web is a score of 1: no sustainability, the outer circle expresses full sustainability, a score of 10. All average scores are weighted for the population size of each country.
And this the progress we have made since 2006:
In this graph, the largest progress is for Income, expressed by GDP per person, the largest decline for Genuine Savings and the indicators concerning the main issues of Climate Change.
What are we doing? What is happening on our one and still only planet? Let’s have a look at the correlation between Human and Environmental Wellbeing. The purple line indicates the trend, which is unmistakably a downward one. The countries with a population over 100 million, are marked in this picture.
World 2006 – 2014
Since five editions of the SSI are available now, we can present the correlations between HW and EW across 2006 – 2014. Two graphs are plotted below:
The first one, presenting the correlation between HW and EW, strongly confirms the negative correlation between the two dimensions we already have seen for 2014. Mind you, a strong negative one! Not surprising, but well documented now.
The second figure presents the correlation of HW and EW with income, expressed by GDP per capita. It looks that HW and EW are at collision course. On average, higher income correlates with higher HW and lower EW. All three correlations are statistically strong. Nevertheless, the correlations are not necessarily causal ones, though at least suggestive.
Green Growth or No Growth
Since an ever diminishing level of Environmental Wellbeing will not be able to support decent human life on the long run, the statement that it is either Green Growth or No Growth cannot be denied any longer. This raises the question: how to avoid the collision course of Human and Environmental Wellbeing? The answer is simple: decouple the growth of HW and EW.
However, there might be another way to avoid the collision: No Growth in income. Why should there always be growth? Already in 2007 UNDP stated that an income over $ 40,000 per person doesn’t contribute to a higher level of wellbeing. Peculiar enough, everybody prefers that his or her income keeps growing, in spite of the clear statement of the UNDP.
Accepting that there will be growth anyway, we’ll have to decouple the growth of HW and EW:
- For those who already have a reasonable income à focus on growth in wellbeing
- For those who still lack a reasonable income à focus on growth in income to enable growth in wellbeing
- For all people à focus on growth without further depletion of natural resources and destroying of the environment and make a rapid transition from the usual linear economy towards the required circular economy.
Anything new in this? Not very much, I suppose for those who are interested in sustainability and well informed. I hope it will nevertheless stimulate everybody to support the acceleration of the transition we need badly. Let’s elaborate possibilities for an successful approach of decoupling the growth of HW and EW on short notice. Hopeful signs can be seen worldwide, if you’re open for it. This shows how I see it:
