In nature, nothing grows forever. Animals live and die; trees tower and fall; new generations sprout from decay. Expansion is always intimately connected to decline.

Yet somehow, we’ve landed in an economic system that’s built on the notion of eternal growth. An economy that doesn’t grow is deemed not ‘stable’ but ‘stagnant’ and treated as a political liability – even if its people and places are thriving.

That creates a quandary for today’s decision makers. Economic growth has historically been tethered to rising carbon emissions. But can that link be broken through things like better policies and greener tech?

Or, are we asking the wrong questions?

There’s certainly some progress to celebrate. At the end of last year, a study by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), a U.K.-based non-profit, found that most countries have successfully ‘decoupled’ growth from emissions over the past decade.

According to that analysis, countries responsible for 46.3 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) and 36.1 percent of global emissions have ‘absolutely decoupled’ – meaning their emissions are falling even as their economies are growing.

A further 46 percent of global GDP comes from countries that have ‘relatively decoupled’ – meaning their emissions are still rising, but more slowly than GDP – and represent 52.9 percent of global emissions.

But does that mean we can keep on pursuing economic growth forever?

Decoupling isn’t happening quickly enough

While decoupling might work in some contexts, it’s probably not the silver bullet that will stop us from overshooting planetary boundaries. Instead, a knottier and deeper challenge sits ahead: redefining progress.

Mark Burton, an independent scholar-activist in Manchester, U.K., who wrote a critical response to the study, says while there is evidence for decoupling of growth from carbon emissions in some places, it’s far from a carte blanche for business as usual.

“First, it’s only some countries,” he says. “Secondly, the scale of it is insufficient. None of these countries are decoupling at anything like the rate that we need.”

Peter Victor, a professor emeritus at York University in Toronto, Canada, who directs the International Ecological Footprint Learning Lab (IEFLL) partnership, agrees.

“It’s very easy to just look at those results and think, ‘Oh well, green growth is real, so we don’t have to worry about our economy: we can just keep it growing as long as we put in place these emission-reducing technologies and so on.’”

But that’s unfortunately too simple a take. One major omission in the study, says Victor, is the impact of trade. If, for instance, a rich country is importing high-carbon goods from other, less affluent countries, those emissions don’t show up in its account.

That might explain why high-income countries, as defined by the World Bank, are the only ones that have
achieved absolute decoupling over the past 20 years.

The report’s focus on annual emissions flows is also misleading. “The core issue is not the annual flow of emissions but their accumulation in the atmosphere,” he says.

“That’s what causes climate change. So you can have decoupling and still have a climate catastrophe. The required pace of reduction is far beyond what has been achieved.”

Are we decoupling growth from resource extraction?

Moreover, says Burton, the current ecological crisis is about more than carbon emissions and the climate crisis. Even if our emissions can be reduced, growth still means more demand for materials and other resources.

“We’re in ecological overshoot on all sorts of dimensions: water, the destruction of ecosystems and habitats, ocean acidification and so on,” he says.

“The material flows that underpin economic growth aren’t decoupling. In some ways, carbon emissions are almost the easiest to decouple.”

A further problem, he says, is that the emissions reductions we’re seeing in the decoupling countries have been in areas “where they’ve basically taken the low-hanging fruit.”

“In Britain, for example, the reduction has largely been in our electricity system, moving from coal to gas. We’ve done the easy bit, and not fast enough. And it’s going to get more difficult, because governments are still pursuing economic growth.”

Depressing? Well, yes – but alternative, ‘post-growth’ pathways are out there, and many people are already steering towards them.

One more radical incarnation that is growing in popularity in the Global North is a concept called degrowth.

Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel defines this as “a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human wellbeing.”

Beyond GDP

One important step in that direction is to change what we measure – and what meaning we ascribe to it.

First up, as UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for at an international economics conference in January this year, is to move beyond our current focus on GDP and “measuring the things that really matter to people and their communities.”

GDP tracks the monetary value of goods and services produced in a particular place across a certain time period and has been the main measure of economic progress and comparison since the 1940s.

Yet, in Guterres’ words, it “tells us the cost of everything, and the value of nothing.”

That’s because it doesn’t take into account how money is gained and distributed. For instance, some countries have high GDP alongside extreme levels of poverty, because the bulk of their cash is going to a few very wealthy people.

The measure also fails to take into account how growth impacts the environment – for example, through carbon emissions, pollution, resource depletion and the destruction of ecosystems.

“Let us not forget that when we destroy a forest, we are creating GDP,” said Guterres. “When we overfish, we are creating GDP.”

Valuing what matters

That disconnect between economic drivers and material reality is both flawed and dangerous, Victor writes in his 2023 book Escape from Overshoot: Economics for a Planet in Peril.

“The convenience of treating the economy as an isolated system comes at the cost of neglecting its deep connections to the rest of society – of overlooking the economy’s total dependence on the Earth for materials and their disposal and on the life-giving solar energy from the sun.”

In line with Guterres’ critique, Victor argues that the focus of measurement must shift from economic value to human wellbeing and physical impact on the planet.

“We’ve got to reduce this material throughput – our ecological footprint. What changes does that mean in terms of how we lead our lives?”

Such a change, he argues, will require “a collective shift in mindset, similar to societal responses during war or pandemics.”

In nature, the systems that endure are not those that grow biggest but those that adapt best. Can we reorient our economies to define progress as sufficiency, resilience and wellbeing?

The solutions are out there across the diverse spheres of human experience, from food and energy production to the ways we value time, care and community.

That’s particularly relevant to rich countries, many of which are still among the world’s highest emitters per capita.

Changes like reducing working hours, implementing maximum income limits, facilitating intergenerational living and investing in collective resources like public transport are all on the table. The question now is whether we will choose them.