Why do sustainability policies advocate for economic growth?! It's time to take the GDP blinkers off. *Conservation is incompatible with economic growth*
Check out our new open-access paper w @g_kallis & @GuyPeer3 & 19 others here: https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/conl.12713

We trawled through 28 major international biodiversity and sustainability policies and found many quotes like this “the key aim for a transition to a green economy is to enable economic growth and investment while increasing environmental quality” (UNEP)

The glaring issue here is, no one has shown how to actually decouple economic growth from biodiversity loss! I was amazed to see that less than a quarter of these major policy documents even acknowledge this may be an issue...

Economic growth is so entrenched in our thinking, all of the future pathways in major models (SSPs) assume economic growth.

This is a problem. We cannot create a better future if we don't first see that we're working within an inherently destructive paradigm. One that falsely equates GDP with human well-being.

We're starting to realize that continuous econimic growth leads not to better lives, but to the collapse of the very things we depend on to survive.

The frustrating thing is, we WILL one day fully accept the madness of relentlessly chasing economic growth, but do we need to completely crash and burn before we learn? Or will we pre-emptively pull on the brakes?