Can degrowth stop climate change and end poverty?
Green growth pathways to stop climate change assume the economy will keep growing - pushing global average temperatures beyond the 1.5 C limit before bringing temperatures back down later in the century by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. A proposed alternative, known as degrowth, is to shrink rich economies to cut energy demand now, making the transition to a clean economy easier. Critics of green growth say it relies on speculative levels of carbon dioxide removal technology. Critics of degrowth say it will increase poverty in poorer countries.
In this repository, you will find the methodology, data and code behind the story that came out of this analysis.
Story by: Ajit Niranjan
Read the full article on DW.com: English
Data Sources
Data on GDP per capita, life expectancy and CO2 emissions per capita were taken from Our World in Data, a research plaftorm linked to the University of Oxford. It is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, billionaire heiress Susanne Klatten, who is the richest woman in Germany, and the Quadrature Foundation, which is part of UK-based investment management firm Quadrature Capital.
GDP figures are pre-adjusted for inflation over time. The analysis uses data from 2019 for bubble charts on life expectancy, gdp per capita and co2 emissions. This is to avoid the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on all three variables.
Country-level CO2 emissions were taken from the Global Carbon Project, a collaborative research project backed by UN agencies and scientific institutions across the world. The remaining global carbon budget to keep warming to 1.5 C above pre-industrial temperatures was taken from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report. The deadline of 2044 is a simplified estimate that tracks a linear fall in CO2 emissions using the remaining budget. A more concave or convex pathway would change the final date that emissions would need to hit zero. Whether this would keep warming to 1.5 C or not is also dependent on other greenhouse gases like methane.
Interviews
Yamina Saheb, IPCC author and Senior energy policy analyst at Paris-based think tank OpenExp.
Jarmo Kikstra, a climate modeler at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna and co-author of a modeling study on providing decent living standards without exceeding planetary boundaries.
Lorenz Keyßer, a degrowth researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich.
Fadhel Kaboub, an economist at Denison University in the US who studies financial sovereignty in poor countries.
Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and author of a book on degrowth.
Lyla Mehta, a sociologist at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex who has published a feminist critique of degrowth.