What would a good life for all within planetary boundaries look like?
There are not enough resources for all people to enjoy the material standard of living of an average European. Therefore, the Western resource-intensive standard of living cannot be generalized worldwide. In the current way of provisioning it is not possible to reach well-being for all within the ecological limits.
Kate Raworth proposes in her book Doughnut Economics10 that the aim of economies should not be the
growth of GDP, but ensuring that everyone has what is essential for life while simultaneously ensuring that critical planetary processes are not endangered. She uses the image of a doughnut shape with an inner and outer ring as a safe and just space, in which humanity should operate. Inside this ‘doughnut’, the resource use is high enough to reach a social foundation of wellbeing (inner circle) but low enough to not transgress planetary boundaries (outer circle). Building on the ‘safe and just space’ framework, O´Neill et al. suggest the adoption of a ‘human needs-based’ approach. Nutrition, sanitation, income, access to energy, education, social support, equality, democratic quality and employment are the needs which should be satisfied.
Furthermore, they include two measures of human well-being, namely self-reported life satisfaction and healthy life expectancy to measure ‘the good life’. For measuring the safe space at the national scale they combine national consumption-based environmental footprints (ecological footprint, material footprint) and planetary boundaries (measures: CO2 emissions, phosphorus, nitrogen, blue water, eHANPP) which they downscaled to the national level.11 This approach gives us an idea of what a good life for all within planetary boundaries could look like, and makes us realise just how far we are from achieving this. Currently, no country fulfils all basic needs whilst not transgressing sustainability thresholds. Strategies to improve provisioning systems so that needs can be fulfilled more sustainably are needed. Both sufficiency and equity play an important role in that. Climate policy which strives for a dignified life for all people requires redistribution policies and depends on collective decision making and collective provisioning.
Graphic 3 National performance relative to a ‘safe and just space’ for the United States and Sri Lanka12 Ideally, a country would have blue wedges that reach the social threshold (nothing is white inside the social threshold) and green wedges within the biophysical boundaryn (nothing is green outside the biophysical boundary).
