Thoughts on the Global Justice Report

What can we actually hope for in a world on fire?

The Global Justice Report was published last week, putting forward a bold plan for ‘equality and prosperity within planetary boundaries’. Its overarching argument is that a world where humanity can live sustainably and thrive is possible if economic, social, and political reforms are urgently made.

Our thoughts on the report, explored in this Substack exclusive, are mixed.

On the one hand, it is a daring, imaginative account that puts forward a plan of achieving a good life for all within ecological constraints. It rightly calls out the unsustainable consumption patterns of wealthy nations, criticises the dominant economic paradigm, and is rooted in ecological justice. And, as we’ll explain, it makes some genuine original interventions in the process, which are good to see.

On the other hand, its optimism could be (should be) viewed as misplaced, the urgency of our unravelling ecological condition is not properly considered, and adaptation to a hotter, more dangerous, more chaotic world is not nearly sufficiently explored.

Let’s go into the good things about the report first. Key emphasis in the report is given to the topic of sufficiency. We should not consume more than we need, but nor should we produce more than we need. Currently, our approach has been that if it can be sold, then it should be made. This leads to a global overproduction of products and services that do not improve people’s lives, many people spending their days working in sectors that add little to no benefit, and a chronic overuse of natural resources. The impact of focusing on sufficiency would reduce environmental resource use, average working hours, and non-essential job roles (what our one-time colleague the late, great David Graeber would have called ‘bullshit jobs’).

Along a similar vein, the report argues that to ensure this better future we should abandon Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as our central measure of progress. The reason for this is that to pursue GDP growth as an end in itself is the same attitude outlined in the above paragraph; if it can be sold then this is justification enough. GDP, however, ignores environmental and social harm, does not track with improvements in wellbeing after a certain point, and often exacerbates both local and international inequalities. The shortcomings of GDP have been known for decades, with Simon Kuznets, the creator of the metric, warning governments to be wary since “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income”. Nevertheless, it is the most dominant economic metric in the world and almost every country’s economic policy is centered around growing GDP.

There is promising work happening on trying to move away from GDP, and the UN’s recent High Level Expert Report on Beyond-GDP published in May is a great example of the increased attention that this approach to economics is receiving. Nevertheless, what is particularly encouraging about the Global Justice Report’s call to move away from GDP is that approaches to increasing prosperity and to dealing with poverty have traditionally been rooted in economic growth.

During the 80s and 90s, academics and governments argued that the route out of poverty for developing countries was to grow their economy. Through the IMF, World Bank, and other ‘development’ funds, western nations lent developing countries huge amounts of money to be spent on infrastructure projects designed to stimulate economic growth. In return, ‘developing’ countries were pressured to open domestic markets to western investors. This market liberalisation was supposed to stimulate economic growth that would lift a ‘developing’ country’s population out of poverty. The result, however, was that environmental harm (both local and global) was ignored, predatory practises depleted developing countries of natural resources, many developing countries became trapped in debt/interest cycles, and the unequal distribution of economic growth was ignored resulting in big ‘winners’ within countries but many ‘losers’ too. To see a report on reducing poverty and improving quality of life at a global level that does not pedal the same failed growthist, market-driven solutions is what sets this Global Justice Report apart.

However, it is difficult to view the optimism in this report as anything other than misplaced and unjustified. The picture it paints about a future 2100 is a utopian vision that fails to fully consider just how dire our situation is. For example, the report argues that we can definitely limit global over-heat to 2 degrees. We are currently on track for 2.6/2.7 degrees of over-heating, probably accelerating to 3 or even maybe 4 if certain feedbacks / tipping points kick in: because numbers like 2.6/2.7 are based on existing climate models that are particularly bad at accounting for the risks inherent with climate breakdown. For example, various global tipping points are at risk due to current overheat, and the crossing of these tipping points are expected to lead to cascading effects for the global temperature and environment. Similarly, 7 out of the 9 identified planetary boundaries have been transgressed, any one of which (especially the ‘big three’, biodiversity, climate and ocean acidification, all now breached) could cause the collapse of the global ecological system.

Due to the extreme dangers we face, and the level of climate impact that is now unavoidable even if we get our act together, the pragmatic approach now simply must include seeking to adapt strategically to this volatile world. However, the report fails to sufficiently explore the potential and necessity of adaptation, only mentioning it twice when discussing the need to finance adaptation funds for developing countries. It is not just developing countries that desperately need to adapt, as the National Emergency Briefing demonstrates. In the UK we are seeing increased flooding, droughts, fires, and crop failures, and we are so far much luckier than many countries.

Most people are aware of the existential, potentially collapse-inducing nature of climate breakdown, and a mobilisation strategy for the majority of people desperately concerned but unsure how to turn this concern into action is notably missing from the Global Justice Report.

Our view is that the best hope for mobilising silent majorities now lies precisely in taking adaptation and resilience deadly seriously, as a strategic imperative. For that is our best chance of generating agency (a sense of collective efficacy), of making climate and nature deeply relevant to most people, and (bluntly) of not being ‘knocked out’ by the impending crises. The lack of any such idea in this lengthy report is in the end what makes us think that it is unfortunately not offering the reorientation we now badly need.