The notion that economic growth inevitably degrades the environment is being challenged today by a paper published in the journal Nature.
The modelling study produced by the CSIRO suggests that well-designed policies can essentially allow Australians to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to prosperity and sustainability.
Lead author of the report and chief scientist for the CSIRO, Steve Hatfield-Dodds worked alongside a team of colleagues to examine 20 difference scenarios of economic growth and environmental change in Australia.
The scenarios that offered the best results hinged upon carbon emissions falling to zero by 2040, in some cases even while living and economic standards improved.
Hatfield-Dodds and colleagues therefore suggest a major ideological shift is required to occur before Australia can ‘decouple’ economic growth from environmental degradation.
“In most cases, reducing environmental pressure results in economic growth being a little slower than it would be in the short term, but then stronger in the long term. In some cases – like energy efficiency – reducing environmental pressure results in stronger economic growth almost immediately,” he said.
However, reducing some environmental pressures don’t necessarily equate to a marked effect on individual wealth, Hatfield-Dodds said.
“…perhaps the most striking aspect of the results is that very large reductions in environmental pressures – including reversing the loss of native habitat in our agricultural landscapes, or achieving zero or lower net greenhouse gas emissions – have relatively modest impacts on income and living standards, whether the impacts are positive or negative.”
Director of International and Development Economics in the Crawford School of Public Policy at Australian National University, Professor David Stern said that this study joins a number of similar inquiries that simulate the economic and environmental impacts of relevant policies, which tend to “find that strong policies to abate greenhouse emissions do not prevent economic growth”.
“This is in contrast to what they call ‘Communitarian Limits’ approaches like Tim Jackson’s book Prosperity Without Growth that claim that economic growth must stop in order for society to have a chance at dealing with climate change,” Stern said.
“The surprising finding in the paper is that there are scenarios where the economy doesn’t just continue to grow under a strong climate policy but that income per person is actually higher than under current trends – “Win-Win”. This seems to be because Australia gains from changes in the global economy under the strong climate policies.”