Degrowth explained: A radical idea for a sustainable future
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Hello and welcome to this episode of What's in the World from the BBC World Service. I'm your host, Hannah Gelbart. We're often told that growth is a good thing. More jobs, more money, more stuff. But what's the cost of all that? We live on a finite planet. And when richer countries grow and get richer, it's often at the expense of poorer countries. They are used for their resources or to dump waste. And we're often told that growth is a good thing.

And there's now a movement of people trying to encourage us to see the world from a different perspective. They're calling for something called degrowth, which would in practice mean countries in the global north using less energy and fewer resources. So how likely is degrowth? What would it take? And could it do more harm than good?

And joining us here in the studio is BBC journalist Alvaro Alvarez, who has been looking into this. Hello, welcome. Thank you. It's a pleasure being here, Hannah. So how did you get interested in degrowth? A couple of years ago, I came across a book with the word degrowth in its title. It connected a lot of the concepts that I think are important

important for our crisis right now. I also found out that a lot of the people working on degrowth were based in Spain, which is where I grew up. So it kind of like had a personal connection for me. And I was really, really interested in looking into it. And what actually is it? For a lot of people listening, it might sound like degrowing is going backwards.

Let me start my reply with a quote, which is, anybody that thinks that exponential growth can go on forever on a finite planet is either mad or an economist.

This is a quote from an economist, and it basically connects to degrowth in the fact that the idea that degrowth is saying that we need to stop the exponential production in all sectors of society. So degrowth is not saying that we need to reduce everything. It's saying that we need to decrease production.

some elements of our production that are not beneficial. An example of those elements would be fast fashion, private jets, the beef and meat industry. So it's not about decreasing everything. It's about understanding what we need to decrease and what we need to grow in order to reach

well-being for everybody within planetary boundaries. And what would they like to grow? Well, things that need to grow would be things like public transport, public housing, regenerative agriculture, things that will keep us, again, within planetary boundaries without being detrimental for everyone.

And a lot of this has to do with GDP because de-growthers say that the way we measure our economies via something called GDP is wrong. It's not working for us. We need a new measure. Correct. That's a very important point. And GDP, it basically translates to gross domestic product.

And that is the value of all the goods and services that we produce in a country in a certain time. So GDP has been on for a while, and it's a very simple way of measuring the economy. But the growth is argued that it's not really good because it leaves out a lot of important things. It leaves out environmental impact.

It leaves out unpaid work and it leaves out as well inequality. One example of an increase in GDP would be taking down a big bunch of forest to put a factory. So you have factory, you have more jobs, you have production, and then your GDP goes up.

up, but you're not counting the environmental impact that that would have, both for nature and maybe for the people living around the factory, that maybe their well-being will decrease. You mentioned that this idea of degrowth is taking off in Spain. Where else is it? In places like Japan, the UK also. There is an increased number of students who are enrolling into Masters of Degrowth, which are starting to basically...

grow paradoxically in different countries. So it's a movement that is gaining traction and a lot of people are talking about the need to go into an economy that some people call beyond growth. So what would everyday life look like for people who prioritise degrowth? Well you might have seen some of the videos of people sharing their sustainable off-grid lifestyles online. This is Anna from New Zealand.

Sustainability is really important to my partner, Steph and I, so we've tried to use as many renewable resources or upcycled secondhand materials while building as possible. We are fully off the grid running on solar power, rainwater and a composting toilet system. I try to grow as many of our fruits and veggies as possible. Where we can't grow them ourselves, we buy local or just go without.

I really love to sew but I don't love the waste of working with textiles so I use second hand materials like curtains and sheets and tablecloths I find at the dump. That's how I've made most of my clothes. Sometimes I get comments assuming we're anti-tech. I actually love technology, I love having a washing machine, it's more water efficient than I could ever be, it can run it on solar power. Our goal isn't self-sufficiency but community sufficiency. I want to use the luxury of time and space that I have to provide better healthy food options for people in my community through our free pantry.

So, Alvaro, is this an actual example of degrowth? This is one of the examples of how degrowth or what degrowth would look like. It's important to say that degrowth is not only about the individual, but it also focuses in systemic issues and in systemic changes. So it's basically not enough just with what we do as individuals. One of the examples that I've come across during my reporting is a housing cooperative that I visited when I went to Barcelona.

The idea is that basically the whole group owns this place and makes the decisions related to how you organize and make this place work. So you have bigger communal spaces. You have a building that was decided to be made in a net zero way. So it's very energy efficient.

The idea is like the community has a saying on how we all live together, not just individuals. One thing I want to talk about is for a long time we have been told that growth is a good thing. It's been credited with lifting loads of people out of poverty. So is it possible to degrow the economy but also protect people's quality of life and not risk people going back into poverty?

poverty? Well, we actually need to mention that a big majority of the economists right now believe that degrowth would be detrimental for most people. So I would say that a lot of people think that it would be a difficult thing and it will be problematic. But we actually don't know what this would look like. And another criticism is that degrowth would only really work in the global north. So could it ever be applied to the global south as well?

We have to be clear on the fact that degrowth literature focuses on the need of the North to degrowth, but they don't say that the Global South needs to degrow. So they basically say that the Global South needs to still reach levels of well-being for all that are still not there. I would say a good way of putting it is degrowth.com.

does not ask people who don't have enough to live with less, but they ask people who have too much to live with enough.

What about innovation? Here's Professor Sam Fankhauser, who studies climate change economics at Oxford University. I think degrowth underestimates the power of innovation. Degrowth underestimates the need for investment that we need in new technology and in new solutions. And degrowth underestimates the social sort of feasibility of what they propose.

In the UK since 1990, we get three times the amount of economic prosperity out of a ton of CO2 than we did in 1990. So that's a big decoupling. The speed at which that has happened hasn't been sufficient, but we sort of are in the S-curve in the accelerating part of those technological changes so things can speed up.

Alvaro, what would de-growthers say to that? What de-growth would say is we need to do the transition. We need to basically have the transition that we go away from fossil fuels. But they basically say that that would not be enough.

So we would still consume a lot of things. We will still extract from nature. We are seeing it that minerals like lithium are being still extracted for the energy transition. So it's not that green growth is a bad idea in itself. It's like this would not be enough to reach the goals that we need to reach.

We know that the climate crisis is real, it's urgent, it's accelerating. So we know that if we continue in the way that we are, we are not going to hit the environmental targets that people have set out in various different agreements. If we do go the degrowth route, what could the best case scenario look like? Well, according to the degrowth literature, we would basically need to right now drastically stop using fossil fuels and

go very, very quick into the energy transition and decrease the amount of energy and materials that we use. If we did all that, we would be in a better situation. It's still unclear how that would look like. Álvaro, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. And that is it for today. Thank you for joining us. This is What's in the World from the BBC World Service. I'm Hannah Gelbart. We'll see you next time.

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