By Michael Abrams
World Overshoot Day is the day in the calendar year at which point humanity begins to use up more resources than the planet can sustainably generate in one year. By 2018 and 2019 the date had moved back to July 29. But COVID’s effect on global production was so profound that 2020 saw the date move up to August 22. Now, in 2025, it’s back to July 24.
This shows that, even in a time of lockdown and recession, humanity still took far more from the Earth than the Earth can regenerate. It is as if we only briefly slowed down a comet that is still going to hit us, and we did it in a way that multiplied human suffering.
— Towards a Wellbeing Economy that serves both people and nature
A cluster of global challenges, including climate change and inequality, require a profound change in mindset. However, as the result of governmental inertia, societal damages — such as respiratory illnesses resulting from air pollution, floods caused by climate change, and the health effects of poor diet — tend to be confronted only after the fact. What is required are economies that are oriented towards prevention. This is the primary purpose of the Well-Being economy.
There is a clear link between the ecological crisis and inequality. Environmental degradation is both a factor in and a result of inequality in all its forms — whether economic, political or social.
This is demonstrated by the outsized carbon footprint of the world’s richest, who account for 52% of the carbon emissions over 1990–2015 — while the poorest half of humanity accounted for only 7%. The top 1% alone accounted for 15%; tellingly, this group also accounted for fully half of the aggregate emissions from flying.
At present, some 20 million lose their home as the result of extreme climate events such as tornadoes, floods and wildfires. An individual is more likely to be displaced by such events than by conflict by a factor of three to one. In addition slow moving climate change-related disasters such as drought and rising sea levels account for the displacement of millions.
The global poor account for the bulk of climate refugees but even in wealthy countries like the US there are relatively affluent communities whose members are scrambling to relocate as the result of being chronically affected by wildfires. Overall, a climate refugees is four times more likely to come from a low or middle income country than a high income country.
Seven of the 10 countries with the highest rates of climate-related internal migrations are island states like Cuba and Tuvalu. People in those countries are more likely to be climate refugees than Europeans by a factor of 150. The nations who make the least contributions to climate change are the ones that are most affected by it.
That the rich nations are the biggest contributors to climate change but are least affected by it is emblematic of environmental degradation as a whole. On the one hand, the actions that G7 and OECD take or fail to take will largely determine the planet’s future as a viable life support system. Conversely, the poor are the first to feel the effects of pollution and other forms of degradation. Thus, the effort to manage the global economy within the doughnut must go hand in hand with efforts to reduce the outsized inequalities that exist within the global system.
At every stage — from the worker in the field to the consumer in the supermarket — the industrial model of agriculture is rife with the exploitation of people, and complicit in the degradation of the planet’s life support systems.
Agroecology has emerged as an alternative model.
“This holistic approach weaves together the many dimensions of farming: environmental, social, economic and political. At the environmental level, it actively sustains ecosystems rather than just extracting value from them. . . . At the social and cultural level . . . it is knowledge intensive and promotes horizontal (farmer to farmer contacts . . .The economic dimension involves a vision of a social and solidarity economy, promotes the diversification of on-farm incomes and enables fair prices for small-scale farmers. . . . Politically, agrocecology prioritizes the needs and interests of small-scale farmers, and not corporations, from farm to fork.”
— Towards a Wellbeing Economy that serves both people and nature
No other segment of the global economy is more deleterious to the social and ecological health of the planet than the textile industry. It represents an enormous draw on natural resources in a linear supply chain that ends at the landfill site, while perpetuating an industrial model based on workers getting pennies and the giant corporations in the fashion industry reap windfall profits.
The built environment represents a leverage point. The construction and heating of the European building stock represents an enormous leverage point for the transition to a sustainable society. This includes social sustainability, as for large segments of the European population, the pursuit of affordable housing, with manageable subsidiary costs, is a persistent challenge.
At the root of this is an economy that treats housing as a financialized commodity rather than as a human right. This includes a model where housing is located far from employment and retailers so that residents are dependent on fossil fuels for everyday tasks.
Despite its promise of the ephemeralization of the economy, digital technology has its own environmental and social costs. Currently it is responsible for 1.5–3.2% of global emissions, which could double within the next few years. Distribution of these emissions is highly skewed, with those from Europe greater than those of LIC’s by a factor of 8.
Now in 2025 there are some 75 billion devices connected to the Net, up from 2018 by a factor of 10. The average European has five times as many devices as the average LIC citizen and more than twice the world average. The demand for the metals and minerals necessary to manufacture these devices has mushroomed. These items tend not to be recycled and often wind up in e-waste dumps. The per capita annual e-waste generated by Europeans is 7.2 kg.
The manufacture of digital products mirrors that of other segments of the economy, with assembly line workers making Apple products barely making a livable wage while Apple itself surpasses a trillion dollars in valuation. As the result of automation, about half these poorly paid jobs will disappear by 2030.
Smart phones, which have become indispensable for hundreds of millions in Europe, have their own environmental costs. They are disposable, with a half life of three years. The 630 million in use in Europe result in annual emissions of 14 million tons of CO2 — on par with the emissions of a whole middle income country. With such figures, claims that the digitalization of a society will result in significantly lower environmental impact are easily disputed.
Globally more than three of four individuals spend more than three hours per day on their smartphone, with predictable long-term social and health effects. It also represents an assault on privacy with corporations awash in the personal data that these phones supply.
The computer industry and its offshoots account for an enormous concentration of power and wealth. Of the ten richest people in the world more than half made their billions during and during the transformation in which computers became central to our lives. There has been little attempt to regulate these companies.
Men dominate the digital workforce that either mine and quarry the materials necessary for the products, or manufacture the electronics. Women account for only 8% of the managers.
Racial injustice is a factor as much of the e-waste winds up in the Third World in countries such as Vietnam and Nigeria.
There is a tremendous need for a reinvention of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector along environmentally and socially sustainable lines. “The combination of a wasteful approach to the materials that make up our devices and the power in the hands of those who control our data threatens both planetary boundaries and key aspects of social sustainability.”
The relentlessly increasing digitalization of our lives, and its resulting environmental effects, must be curtailed, “while creating an open and fair digital where individuals are able to control their technology, rather than the other way around.”
Three structural factors have been identified that must be overcome if a society is to attain social and environmental sustainability:
1) “shifting costs onto others by perpetuating structural injustices rooted in the imperial and colonial past”
2) “economic and political inequality worldwide that leads to biased rules, which increase inequality even further and undermine democracy”
3) “ever accelerating material use as an outcome of the dependency on growth.”
In contrast a wellbeing economy would
1) re-design the structures that perpetuate discrimination and racism
2) bring democracy into the economy by empowering people on each wrung to take control of their economic lives
3) remove the linkage between the economy and growth, thus relieving the burden on the planet’s life support systems.
Without a concerted and rapid transition to this new regime, our civilization is on the road to collapse with untold suffering for the world’s people.
“The well-being economy encompasses a diverse array of ideas and actions aimed at advancing social well-being through governance structures that support peaceful co-existence and meet basic human needs. . . . It aims to serve people and communities first and foremost, and offers a promising path toward greater well-being and environmental health.”
Since roughly 1980 the demand for economic growth has eclipsed social goals like health and education. Climate change and biodiversity loss are now a fact of human life, with profound implications for human health.
To measure societal success capitalism, the world’s primary economic system, uses economic measures such as the GDP to the detriment of other measures such as those of income inequality and its effects on the quality of life.
Since 1980 income inequality has been on the rise globally and while the bottom half of the global population has seen a rise in average income, their aggregate income is only half of that of the top 1% of earners. This inequality extends to gender, where women earn 84 cents for every dollar that men earn. And, as noted by epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, economic inequality has profoundly deleterious effects on society in a variety of ways.
The principles of a well-being economy are
Restoring a harmonious relationship between society and nature
Ensuring a fair distribution of resources to address economic inequality
Supporting healthy and resilient individuals and communities
— The vision of a wellbeing economy
A wellbeing economy supports a good quality of life in tandem with a sustainable planet. Costa Rica stands out as the single tropical nation that has reversed deforestation; it has also set a target for being carbon neutral by 2050. Currently, it generates virtually all (98%) of its electricity from wind and solar power, targeting 100% by the end of the decade.
Higher levels of equality are associated with a better quality of life for everyone. Due to a variety of factors, Iceland ranks first globally for gender equality. Its Cabinet includes five women and six men, while globally only one in five ministers are women. As another example, companies are required to provide three months of parental leave to each parent, and there are laws that provide for equal pay and prohibit gender discrimination by employers.
In a successful well-being economy, everyone lives in dignity, has a sense of connection and belonging, and actively engages with their communities. People have equal access to means that support their basic human needs, including support for physical, psychological, emotional, social and spiritual well-being.
— The vision of a well-being economy
Canada ranks above average for a variety of social factors including housing and social connection. This is the result in part of limiting daily and weekly work-hours. 93% of Canadians say that they have strong personal connections; they also report high levels of subjective well-being.
In 2015 Wales passed the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act; the purpose was to improve well-being in its social, economic, environmental and cultural dimensions. Public bodies are required to set goals with poverty, climate change and other challenges that they are then required to work together to meet.
In 2007 Scotland launched its National Performance Framework. This Framework specifies 11 desired outcomes including safe communities and reduced poverty. 81 indicators such as loneliness, food security and inequality track progress towards these goals.
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