This blog initiates the blog-series of our RELIEF-project funded by the Strategic Research Council of Finland. To address the triple planetary crisis (climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution), governments across the globe have pledged that they can make growth green. To do so, they are endeavouring to transition from fossil fuels to renewables and to use energy more efficiently. In tandem, they are making pledges to protect and restore nature and mitigate different forms of pollution. Unfortunately, while these transitions are in the short-term important measures in helping local-to-global communities mitigate some of the dark ecological side of growth, they are unlikely to suffice in protecting the planetary ecological boundaries in the long run. A more fundamental system-wide transformation of our societies and economies is likely needed. By this we mean cutting the absolute levels of material production and consumption to levels in line with ecology.

In this way, we argue that transition and transformation mean foundationally different things as transitions typically embrace growth and transformation seeks to break away from it to achieve sustainability. We also argue that sufficiency – or in other words, enough for human wellbeing within ecological limits regardless of economic growth – should be the long-term societal strategy to reach sustainability on all levels of governance. We recognise that this path requires painful societal decisions, will take time and is for these reasons highly contested, despite transformation thinking resting on a sound scientific foundation. We also acknowledge that in the short-term, transition measures are important for sustainability but underscore that we must not lose sight that societal processes for transformation need to start now considering the current ecological crises and planetary overshoot. We also unpack why and how legal systems will play an essential – and so far, poorly understood – role in the transition and transformation processes.

Six out of Nine Planetary Boundaries Transgressed

Earth system scientists have established that the Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity. The planetary boundaries of climate change, biosphere integrity, novel entities, land system change, freshwater change and biogeochemical flows have been transgressed. This compromises the ability of future generations of humans to meet their needs, together with the survival of other species. To remedy the situation, and to avoid crossing catastrophic global ecological tipping points, we need to shift our socioeconomic and coupled governance systems towards sustainability, and we must do so at a fast pace. Climate change is a case in point: the 1.5°C degree target of the Paris Agreement is expected to be breached in about 10 years. There is, however, no agreement on what such shift to sustainability would look like.

Figure: Richardson et al, 2023: Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

The Current Sustainability Transition Path: Can Technology Make Growth Green?

So far, the main societal strategies adopted to address the ecological crisis have relied on technology to reduce the environmental impacts of the production of energy, food and other goods without changing the fundamental structures of the socioeconomic system and the coupled governance and legal systems. We call these transition strategies to reach sustainability.

Despite ambitious efforts to mitigate the negative impacts of production, the implicit – and sometimes explicit – goal of these transition strategies has remained unchanged from the pre-transition era: economic growth. Such transition strategies notably involve efforts to replace fossil fuels by renewable energy and to use energy more efficiently. Moreover, they typically aspire to reduce pollution levels by establishing environmental quality standards or requiring the use of new pollution mitigation technologies. These strategies may even aspire to protect biodiversity and restore it by reducing economic production in limited areas. At the end of the day, however, policies aligning with the transition strategy do not challenge the idea of growth, which is the underlying driver for the planetary crises. Indeed, any increase in aggregate consumption and production necessarily leads to more greenhouse gas emissions, pollution and biodiversity loss than would be the case without such an increase.  In this context, why has transition prevailed? Notably because green growth, as they call it, has what it takes to seduce policymakers: it promises to deliver both prosperity and sustainability without needing to delve into difficult distributive justice questions.

Ultimately, the success of the transition strategies adopting the green growth paradigm crucially depends on whether it is possible, as green growthers contend, to decouple economic growth from greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, biodiversity loss and pollution. Can gross domestic product (GDP) continue to grow while GHG emissions, human pressures on biodiversity and pollution levels decrease? And, even more importantly, can environmental impacts decrease fast enough alongside economic growth to avoid crossing catastrophic planetary tipping points?

Several high-income countries have managed to reduce their GHG emissions in absolute terms while their GDP has continued to grow. However, they have not been able to do so fast enough. At current rates of emission reductions and economic growth, it would take them 220 years to reduce their emissions by their 1·5°C fair-shares by the mid-2030s. For 1.5°C to remain within reach, they would need to increase their decoupling rates 12 times by 2030, something that has never been achieved before.

Unfortunately, climate policy is the best performer out of the three: biodiversity and pollution mitigation efforts are likely on a far slower and less ambitious trajectory. How do we know this? By looking at resource use trends. Indeed, resource use is a robust indicator of environmental damage. The evidence on resource use is undoubtedly grim: when including the material impact involved in the production and transport of imported goods, the material footprint of high-income nations has not decreased, either in absolute or relative terms. No decoupling has been achieved. Instead, we are faced with re-coupling: material footprints have risen at a rate equal to or greater than GDP, including in the EU.

We are therefore forced to conclude – without unforeseen and highly disruptive innovation drastically reducing the carbon and material footprints – that current strategies towards sustainability are not successful in making growth green. The technological transition towards renewables, a more efficient use of energy, and decreased biodiversity and pollution impacts will not likely suffice to address the ecological crisis. What more can we do?

Towards Sustainability Transformation: Can Sufficiency Strategies Bridge the Gap?

Fortunately, there is more to do than wait for a miracle that would make growth green. Transformation strategies relying on sufficiency have a large potential to contribute to reducing the gap between ambition and action left by the transition strategies relying on green growth. Transformation strategies based on sufficiency bring to the forefront of sustainability debates the question of enoughness, by asking: what is enough for human wellbeing within ecological limits? On that basis, they propose to secure enough for everyone and to scale down excess consumption. In contrast with the strategies relying on green growth, distributive issues would be tackled hands-on, and the paradigms, goals and values of the socioeconomic system – and coupled governance and legal systems – would be challenged. Moving towards sufficiency would involve abandoning growth as the overarching societal policy goal. Instead, we would seek to place human activities in the sufficiency space between a floor of meeting basic needs and a ceiling of ungeneralizable excess. This space is best described as a doughnut, as Kate Raworth suggested, where the outer circle is constituted by planetary boundaries and the inner circle by basic human needs. The process towards sufficiency is therefore nothing short of a transformation, where the socioeconomic system is fundamentally reorganised across technological, economic, and social factors.

Figure: Raworth, 2012: A Safe and Just Space for Humanity: Can we live within the doughnut?

What would sustainability transformation towards sufficiency involve? On the one hand, to find our way back under the ecological ceiling, consumption in excess of needs would need to be reduced. This would involve income and wealth caps to limit the conspicuous consumption of the rich, who contribute disproportionately to climate change and other environmental crises. In addition, sustainability transformation would include cap and trade mechanisms that cap environmental impacts and require companies (or individuals) to surrender allowances for activities that impact the environment negatively. Compared to the existing climate cap and trade mechanism in the EU, the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, the cap would need to be better enforced by removing the possibility to offset carbon emissions. Moreover, the system would need broadening to biodiversity and pollution questions.

On the other hand, to find our way back above the floor of human needs and to maintain this social foundation without economic growth, sustainability transformation would need to involve social policies that reduce human livelihoods’ vulnerabilities to reductions of economic output. This includes policies that guarantee unconditional income independently of paid employment like Universal Basic Income, or policies that share the amount of work available to reduce employment, while freeing time for leisure and democratic engagement, like Working Time Reduction. The good news is that there are ample policy pathways to implement transformation if there is political will and continued societal effort to do so. Such transformation will, however, invite high political and societal contestation and take a long time. Measures toward realising a transformation need to start now, but there is also a need to keep transition strategies onboard to allow sustainability action in the short term.

The role of law in sustainability transformation

What is the role of law in this transformation, or the more limited transitions? Unfortunately, the question is not often asked. Both transition and transformation scholars and practitioners tend to think that as soon as there is political will for the policies that they preach, the law can be changed accordingly. End of the story. Based on our and others’ research, however, we think that the reality is much more difficult. Law is a complex system, which means that a legal intervention – meaning for instance new piece of EU or national legislation or a new court ruling – may be rendered inefficient by the underlying properties and functions of the legal system. These dynamics usually stem from the path dependencies created by the constitutional setup and foundational principles of the legal system. These include, among others, rule of law requirements (e.g., predictability, protection of legitimate expectations, separation of powers) for new interventions, and the key principles and doctrines of various fields of law from property to contracts and constitutional law. The foundational principles are typically highly resistant to change, particularly the one envisioned in the transformation strategies based on sufficiency.

What makes the situation even more challenging is that even if there were opportunities to shift some of these path dependencies their resistance should not simply be eliminated because many of these legal systemic path dependencies provide a valuable societal service by upholding social stability and subsequently the legitimacy of the legal system: everyone (companies, individuals, public authorities) should be clear what the law requires of them and major changes to the legal requirements cannot take place over night. In this way, for better or for worse, the legal systems’ stabilising feedback loops (or breaks, if you like) will work to maintain and bring back the system to its original (unsustainable) state. Fortunately, legal systems also possess reinforcing feedback loops (in other words, accelerator pedals) that may, if triggered, make an intervention even more effective than intended. Wouldn’t anyone want to know beforehand what feedback loops they might trigger? This is what we are doing in the RELIEF-project: trying to understand how the legal system works and to identify where it is best to start intervening for sustainability transitions and the broader transformation.

Figure: Soininen et al. 2021: A brake or an accelerator? The role of law in sustainability transitions